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View All ProductsIn all areas of resuscitation, from neonatal to elderly care, clinical deterioration is a risk that can be avoided with the help of HealthStream's training programs.
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View All ProductsHealthStream’s learning management system and comprehensive suite of competency management tools empower your healthcare workforce to deliver the best patient care.
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View All ProductsHealthStream leverages medical professional development in healthcare by providing staff training programs
View All ProductsCreate engaging and impactful learning experiences that meet the unique needs of your acute care staff.
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Learn MoreUrgent Care Trends: A Growing Segment in the Healthcare Market
It’s an exciting time to be working in the urgent care industry. Recent data suggests that Urgent Care Centers are attracting 89 million patient visits each year, including more than 29% of all primary care visits in the US, and nearly 15% of all outpatient physician visits. This activity has caused the number of urgent care facilities to increase from 6,400 in 2014 to 8,100 in 2018.
Urgent Care Centers have grown in popularity over recent years for many reasons. Patient demand, cost, and convenience being the biggest ones. Patients are able to get same-day care without the emergency room sticker shock, or lengthy wait times—it’s no wonder urgent care centers are becoming their provider of choice.
Key factors Driving Growth in the Urgent Care Sector:
"Urgent care isn’t booming only because of physicians seeking a better work-life balance. Other factors driving the industry’s growth include patient demand, convenience, and costs. Patients seeking medical care don’t want to wait."
Medical Economics
Becoming an Urgent Care Center of Choice
Although the Urgent Care Association of America and the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine have criteria for urgent care clinics, there are limited regulations or state licensing requirements. Criteria may run the gamut between requiring that the facility be open seven days a week to requiring urgent care centers have a privileging/credentialing system in place.
One way your urgent care center can maintain compliance with state requirements and stand out from the crowd is by achieving accreditation. Accreditation proves that your organization meets the requirements needed to provide high-quality care. The process itself will help you maintain compliance with healthcare laws and regulations and keep up to date with industry standards. Accreditation can also help you meet payment requirements as many payors require accreditation/ certification in order to contract or stay in network. This trend began in early 2017, when Empire BlueCross BlueShield of New York and Blue Cross BlueShield of Georgia started requiring urgent care centers be accredited in order to be in network, and this requirement continues to expand.
When it comes to accreditation, Urgent Care Centers can choose several routes including pursuing accreditation with:
When you look at the number of freestanding urgent care clinics, you’ll see overwhelmingly that the Urgent Care Association (UCA) is the largest and most commonly used organization for accreditation. The UCA is dedicated to representing the growing urgent care industry, and is most popular due to its many member offerings. UCA members are able to access educational resources, listservs to aid in networking, exclusive vendor relationships, as well as a robust network of applicant and employer postings to aid in career development.
All Accrediting Organizations Have Requirements in Place Around Credentialing and Privileging
Credentialing is an umbrella term used by many organizations to summarize the process of obtaining, verifying, and assessing the qualifications of a practitioner to provide care or services in or for a healthcare organization. Privileging is a subset of the credentialing process whereby a healthcare practitioner is authorized to provide a specific scope of patient care services based on an evaluation of the individual’s credentials and performance.
All accrediting organizations have requirements in place around credentialing and privileging, which can require excessive resources to manage due to the amount of provider data that must be collected and managed. Requirements include:
Managing health status items, such as TB testing, flu shots, etc. Urgent Care Centers must also go a step beyond by credentialing their entity and enrolling both their providers and their facility with payors. The total time to credential and enroll a new facility and provider(s) averages 4.5 months. This does not include the time to negotiate contracts which can average 120 days or more per contract. The bottom-line is that it takes a long time to complete the process of getting in network with all the payors you want to work with. Many urgent care centers are managing this process with a mix of spreadsheets and paper, which isn’t sustainable.
Seeing patients and speeding time to revenue
We’re all aware that the climate for healthcare organizations is a challenging one, especially considering healthcare costs are trending upward. Between tighter compliance regulations, increased competition, and tighter budgets, healthcare providers have to do everything possible to reduce costs and streamline healthcare processes as a whole.
One way to do that is through automation which can be used to reduce staffing costs, improve compliance, and significantly speed up the billing and payment cycle. With improved revenue flow and a reduction in non-payment, your urgent care center can spend more time focusing on patient care, not administrative tasks.
Some areas today’s Urgent Care Centers are using technology to decrease expenditure and improving efficiency with are:
Leverage technology to increase patient volume and satisfaction
If you have any doubt at all about your organization’s ability to perform proper credentialing and privileging, then it’s time to reevaluate your current system. Your path to urgent care competency begins with automated procedures that set your organization up to deliver with speed, consistency, and certainty.
CredentialStream has everything your urgent care center needs to request, gather, and validate information about a provider. With a continuously updated platform, best-practice content libraries, and industry-leading data sets, CredentialStream is the most comprehensive provider lifecycle management solution available. Most importantly, the solution is built to grow with your organization; based on your needs you can add functionality to assist with credentialing, privileging, enrollment, onboarding, evaluation, and network management.
Accreditation & Automation = Financial Benefits
On average, an urgent care contract pays approximately 30% more than a primary care contract. Typically, urgent care facilities bill 82% as urgent care, 14% as primary care, and 4% as a combination of both. As areas become more saturated with urgent care options and primary care provider shortages increase, it’s getting harder to contract as urgent care. With a robust automation system in place, you can facilitate accreditation and ensure your urgent care center is approved by payors.
In Summary
As more and more urgent care centers enter the marketplace, the competition to secure contracts and patients will heat up. Achieving accreditation can position you as an urgent care center of choice. This requires a first-rate credentialing and privileging process which can be difficult to impossible to achieve without automation. If you’re not certain about your organization’s ability to perform proper credentialing and privileging, now is the time to act. Implementing automated credentialing and privileging is easier than you think, and better yet, VerityStream is here to help make sure everything runs smoothly.
HealthStream’s learning management system and comprehensive suite of competency management tools empower your healthcare workforce to deliver the best patient care.
View All Learning & PerformanceHealthStream offers performance learning management solutions to help develop your healthcare staff into leaders and reduce turnover.
View All ProductsHealthStream works with healthcare organizations to create engaging and high-quality training videos for your staff and management.
View All ProductsImprove care quality and save money by making informed decisions about your healthcare facility and staff with HealthStream's reporting analytics solution.
View All ProductsHealthStream's proven methods for the improvement and overall engagement of your healthcare staff foster a positive workplace and increase retention rates.
View All ProductsWhen you enact HealthStream's quality compliance solutions, you can do so with the confidence your healthcare organization will meet all standards of care.
View All Quality & ComplianceBe confident in your staff’s ability to reduce risk by providing compliance training that changes behavior.
View All ProductsDevelop next-level people for next-level care by prioritizing quality and safety improvements.
View All ProductsStandardize policy and procedure management with an automated, customized, and centralized system.
View All ProductsEstablish a culture of belonging with education supporting DEI, wellness, engagement, and leadership development.
View All ProductsHealthStream offers professional training and education on how to best optimize your reimbursement process within your healthcare organization.
View All ReimbursementStreamline the revenue cycle management process and protect your bottom line with expert-backed education.
View All ProductsLearn about our advanced resuscitation training solutions. Our solutions are designed to help improve patient outcomes.
View All ResuscitationIn all areas of resuscitation, from neonatal to elderly care, clinical deterioration is a risk that can be avoided with the help of HealthStream's training programs.
View All ProductsNurture the skills of your nurses and medical staff to help mold them into effective leaders with development training from HealthStream.
View All ProductsExpand the decision-making skills and effectiveness of your healthcare workforce with HealthStream's clinical development programs and services.
View All Clinical DevelopmentMake sure your clinicians have the support they need to provide competent care with clinical competency training and development from HealthStream.
View All ProductsHealthStream’s learning management system and comprehensive suite of competency management tools empower your healthcare workforce to deliver the best patient care.
View All ProductsThe suite of healthcare onboarding solutions available from HealthStream aids in nurse retention and improved patient outcomes.
View All ProductsGive your healthcare staff the decision support and skills training they need with the online products available from HealthStream.
View All ProductsHealthStream leverages medical professional development in healthcare by providing staff training programs
View All ProductsMake sure your healthcare staff can schedule out appointments and work schedules with ease using HealthStream's line of software solutions.
View All SchedulingHealthcare workforce management is essential. We provide advanced scheduling solutions for organizations to solve issues such as nurse retention
View All ProductsComprehensive, industry-leading provider onboarding and credentialing software that validate health outcomes and support provider assessment.
View All CredentialingOur affordable CVO credentialing services establish patient safety by enabling primary source verification for your healthcare organization.
View All ProductsIntegrate with Epic to validate and add new providers directly to your provider master file.
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