The number of emergency rooms has been falling in recent years, as the number of people heading into the ER has been climbing.
Urgent care centers — doc-in-a-box outfits that handle urgent health problems that aren’t life-threatening — have been growing to take up some of the slack.
But, this morning’s WSJ notes, urgent care has remained largely unregulated. Urgent care doctors and nurses do have to be licensed the same as health care providers anywhere else, but there are no national standards for what urgent care centers should offer, or what quality measures they should meet.
That looks likely to change. The Urgent Care Association of America recently made a deal with the Joint Commission, the group that accredits the nation’s hospitals, to accredit urgent care centers and publish national quality standards by 2010.
While many insurers already pay for some urgent care services, accreditation could lead to better reimbursements. “We’d look far more favorably at an urgent-care clinic that was accredited than one that wasn’t,” Troy Brennan, chief medical officer at Aetna, tells the WSJ. “[I]t means an organization is taking a hard look at a variety of safety issues that should be involved in caring for someone who is acutely ill.”
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