Practice Velocity® Urgent Care EMR Now Serving Urgent Care Centers in Forty-Eight States

Dr. Mark Ibsen and the rest of the Urgent Care Plus team

With the opening of Urgent Care Plus, Practice Velocity^® now is the EMR of choice for urgent care centers in forty-eight states.

Urgent Care Plus opened its doors to serve patients in Helena, MT in January, 2010. With the addition of Urgent Care Plus, Practice Velocity^® Urgent Care EMR serves the charting, coding and billing needs of over 600 urgent care centers in 48 states. The center has installed the online Practice Velocity Urgent Care EMR and practice management software.

Downtown Helena had no access to urgent care services, so this new center was welcomed by the people living in the area, and the clinic has already seen over 20 patients in a single day. Helena has a population of 30,000 and the surrounding area has a population of 80,000. It is the capital city of the State of Montana. An area of this size can easily support three urgent care centers.

Medical Director and owner Dr. Mark Ibsen has twenty-seven years of emergency medicine experience. Dr. Ibsen captures the vision for Urgent Care Plus with the motto, “The healing begins when you walk through the door.” He added, “We provide acute care with speed, compassion and thoroughness.”

We always say to our customers that, "It’s not about our software; it’s all about your urgent care success." We are honored to help this new urgent care clinic serve the people of their community.

PV Billing, a subsidiary of Practice Velocity, provides the back-office billing functions for the urgent care. In 2009, PV Billing processed over $100-million in claims. Their specialized urgent care expertise allows urgent care physicians to take care of patients and leave the complexities of the billing functions to specialists in urgent care billing.

The Practice Velocity team is unparalleled in experience and expertise, with a combined 200-years-plus experience in urgent care. These professionals have designed every aspect of the urgent care EMR, making the software uniquely focused on urgent care. That may be why more urgent care centers use Practice Velocity systems for charting and coding than every other system combined.

For more information, call Dana Flores at 815-544-7480 or click here to contact us online or to schedule an urgent care EMR web demo.

US Patent Office Issues Patent to Practice Velocity

Practice Velocity^®, LLC has received a patent for the PiVoT^TM system. The PiVoT system is a completely unique system, and this means that the US Government has recognized this unique intellectual property. Many of the unique aspects of the PiVoT system have, also, been incorporated into the VelociDoc^® Urgent Care EMR, so this means that many aspects of VelociDoc are within the realm of this patent.

Practice Velocity expects to continue to innovate new ways to make our software solutions more efficient for use in urgent care centers, and we will continue to seek recognition and protection for the unique aspects of our intellectual property.

You can read the full press release at:
US Patent Office Issues Patent for PiVoT to Practice Velocity Urgent Care Solutions

UCAOA Fall Conference

It was great to see so many of you at the Fall Conference in Dallas. Due the large numbers of people visiting the PV booth, many of you were unable to get a full demo of the system or get personalized attention to your questions. We apologize, but we are always available to take your calls and demo the systems online.
Second in attendance only to the UCAOA Spring Convention, the Fall Conference was clearly a hit, with over 250 attendees. Hitting their goals were all four tracks:
- Basic Coding
- Advanced Coding
- Clinical Urgent Care
- Startup Urgent Care


If you did not get a chance to talk to us or see the system in action, feel free to contact us directly to get a personalized demo of the system. We can go over every aspect of the system: online, same-day appointments, charting, coding billing and collections, EMR and much more. In addition, you may call us and set up a full-day tour of our sister urgent care centers (Physicians Immediate Care), where we outline every aspect of our operations and answer all of your questions.

See you in Orlando in the spring of 2010.

Thanks to Alan Ayers of Concentra for taking these photos.

Surprise the Insurance Company Owns our Competitor Urgent Care

Recently, a group of physicians were in the process of opening a new urgent care center and had requested a contract with the dominant provider of healthcare insurance in the area. The payor was offering a contract with reimbursement well below Medicare rates. The physicians could not understand why the rates were so far below market and why the payor was refusing to budge. Then one of the payor representatives let it slip that the payor was thinking about expanding their own urgent care chain into that town. The doctors were dumbfounded. They had known the brand name of the urgent care chain, as this chain operated many urgent care centers in neighboring towns. The physicians were well aware that this urgent care chain was a potential competitor. But they had been previously unaware that the insurance company actually owned the urgent care chain.

In South Carolina, Blue Cross owns a very large urgent care chain. In California, Kaiser operates its own urgent care chain, and Kaiser generally does not even offer contracts to urgent care centers that it does not operate.

So what is the take-home lesson? If there are any larger chains of urgent care centers in your area, investigate them and be sure that you know what entity owns the centers, before you decide to open an urgent care center. Make sure that no local dominant payor is involved in the ownership. Opening an urgent care center is hard enough if all local payors are working with you. But opening an urgent care center with the dominant local payor refusing to contract (or refusing reasonable rates) will mean tremendous financial struggles. Yes, there may be potential antitrust issues, but getting the federal government to intervene is truly a long shot.

We all know the saying "Caveat Emptor," translated, "Let the buyer beware." Maybe there should be another saying, "Caveat Entrepreneur".

Physicians Immediate Care Makes Thousands of Children Happy

Just how did our sister company (same owners as Practice Velocity, LLC) make make such a positive impact on kids?  Last week, a little girl came into one of our clinics with a fever, cough and runny nose.  Her flu test was positive for influenza A; it turned out to be the Swine (H1N1) flu strain, and the entire school district was closed down for two days… WooHaa… The weather was beautiful, and the kids had a great time.  Bad news, however, the students will spend an extra two days in school at the end of the year.

While the kids where home, the local news showed public school staff “disinfecting” desks, floors, walls and school buses.  Local administrators praised the effectiveness of this 'disinfection.'”  After a day on a solid object (called a “fomite” in medical terminology) at room temperature, essentially 100% of flu viruses will no longer be viable.  Thus, the staff may have been cleaning these objects, but they probably did not kill even a single flu virus in their hundreds of hours of work.  This misdirection of resources emphasizes the need for better education of school administrators on the prevention and spread of influenza viruses.

One of our employees had a daughter who attended the same school as the index case came down with influenza A.  Her daughter took the Tamiflu.  From the picture, you can see that her daughter is already much better.

One point that the US Government seems to be missing in their efforts to prepare for an epidemic or biological terrorist threat is that hospitals and hospital emergency departments will not really be the front line, and their resources will be rapidly overwhelmed.  Urgent care centers in the USA number almost 10,000.  Urgent care is the clinic of choice for patients when they come down with acute, apparently non-life-threatening illnesses.  That means that for any epidemic except a rapidly-fatal epidemic, urgent care centers will be the front line of health care.  The Urgent Care Association of America is in the process of developing policies and information to disseminate this information to the public, government representatives and public health officials.

Even local urgent care centers seemed confused about how they should react.  One local urgent care center made the local news (Urgent Care Center Turns Away Any Possible Flu Cases) when it posted a large "Swine Flu Notice" sign on the front door.  The sign stated that no one suffering from a "sore throat, cough, runny nose or fever" should enter the clinic.  Oops!  Looks like even someone in the industry needed a little update on the mission of urgent care.

I bet that a lot of you have interesting stories about how your urgent care was involved in the Swine Flu panic of 2009.  Just click on the link below to comment and share your stories.

UCAOA-2008 in New Orleans

The annual UCAOA Urgent Care Convention in New Orleans promises to be the biggest and best-ever gathering of urgent care professionals.

In the speaking sessions, I will share my thoughts on managed care contracting in the Comprehensive Clinic Startup track, and I will give an update on urgent care coding (same talk will be available at two different times) during the main convention.

Please sign up at the PV Booth and join us at the Fourth Annual Practice Velocity Event on Thursday, May 1 at 7:30 PM. This year we are having a Blowout Mardi Gras Party. There will be music, food, drink and a drawing for over a thousand dollars in cash. You won't want to miss it.

This year will be your chance to view our new tablet PC EMR--VelociDoc™. Please drop by the Practice Velocity booth and see the EMR and give us your feedback.

See you in New Orleans.

Practice Velocity: The Un-Software Company

MDNG Net Guide (September, 2007) recently ran a story entitled, “Shhhhh! (10 Secrets the EHR Companies Don't Want You to Know).” The article highlighted the seamy underbelly of the EMR business. The “secret” practices referred to in the article are useful for physician to note. Since so many of these practices might be hard to spot--and you might even wonder if Practice Velocity engages in any of these shady practices--we thought that it might be useful to compare these “secret” practices to the open practices of Practice Velocity.

Secret #1: EHR awards have been bought! Yes, many EMR companies have actually paid off companies to give them awards. Practice Velocity has never entered any of these rigged contests, because the only award that Practice Velocity has ever sought is the award the really counts, the accolades of its own customers.

Secret #2: That “non-biased” expert recommending an EHR to you may have been paid off too! Again, many EMR consultants are actually receiving sales commissions as for referrals to purchase their EMR. Practice Velocity has never participated in this deceptive practice. We believe that anyone acting as a salesperson for a product should be identified as a salesperson to the prospective buyer.

Secret #3: Even that EHR-using physician you’ve been referred to may have been paid off! People often ask us how our customers can be such raving fans of Practice Velocity products. No, we have never paid anyone to provide testimonials to the value of our products. Even the many customers that take the microphone and extol the value of Practice Velocity at the annual PV dinner (held during the UCAOA Annual Convention) have never been paid to take the microphone and tell about how PV has worked for them.

Secret #4: The respected physician leader of your local society may also be receiving compensation! Yes, leaders in national urgent care associations have and do use Practice Velocity, but Practice Velocity has never paid them to state this publicly. In fact, in order to protect their credibility as leaders in the urgent care industry, we have encouraged many of them to downplay the fact that they use PV products in their urgent care centers.

Secret #5: Determining how much a specific EHR costs is going to be difficult, and you are going to be nickel-and-dimed every step of the way! Since the very beginning, we have determined that we were tired of the way software companies had treated us as customers. One company even required us to pay up front just to get a quote on how much a modification to their system would actually cost. Instead, Practice Velocity has always made its prices simple and transparent. In addition, since putting our first customer online five years ago, our prices for our charting and coding solutions have never gone up one penny.

Secret #6: Your patient data will be a bargaining chip to prevent you from leaving an EHR company! What a scam! Practice Velocity would never want anyone to say that we had not treated them fairly on exit. That is why we clearly state, up front, in our contracts that the urgent care customer will always have a right to leave with a complete set of patient records.

Secret #7: The return on investment (ROI) argument is another way of saying “this solution is overpriced!” But what if you offered your product on a thirty-day trial basis with no money down, and the urgent care center doesn’t a pay a penny if it doesn’t see real the solution create more value than it costs? Yes, that is what PV promises, “Try us for thirty-days, if you are not absolutely convinced that Practice Velocity Templates (PiVoTs) is paying for itself, then you stop using PiVoTs and pay us nothing.” With the exception of two centers that used the system for under a week, every center that has tried the system for thirty days has decided to pay for and continue using the system.

Secret #8: EHRs don’t improve quality of care and often make you less efficient. And since you won’t figure this out until you are actually using the product, EHR vendors won’t let you try-before-you-buy, and there is no return policy! This is almost always true. But here Practice Velocity is completely different. Remember you can “try-before-you-buy” PiVoTs for 30-days. Even after the thirty days, since PiVoTs work on subscription you only pay for the visits actually charted on the system. You can stop any time with no penalty. Thirty-day trial, only pay for what you use, and stop whenever you want--now, that’s even better than a return policy.

Secret #9: A CCHIT-certified product, by definition, is often more expensive and less usable than non-certified products. That’s an absolute fact. If you make your product for a bunch of academics that don’t practice medicine but do research and evaluate bells and whistles in an EMR, you will make a product with bells and whistles that can pass a bells-and-whistles test. But if you want a product that will work in the cauldron of everyday urgent care, it probably makes more sense to try a product that was developed by urgent care professionals in urgent care centers and is already proven to work in over 180 urgent care centers. That description only fits one product—PiVoTs by Practice Velocity.

Secret #10: There are alternate ways to determine if an EHR, and the company selling you the product, will work for you. And there is no better way than the thirty-day trial that Practice Velocity offers. Try PiVoTs in your urgent care centers for up to thirty days. If you are not convinced that PiVoTs are the absolute best product that you have ever seen or could even imagine for your urgent care, simply stop using PiVoTs and you pay us nothing. As one early implementer (who still uses PiVoTs to chart over 100 patient visits each day in his urgent care center) put it, “Well, David. I guess that’s a no-brainer.”

Yes, and not only is it a "no-brainer," it is one more characteristic that separates PV from the rest of the field--NO SECRETS. Try it and see. For your free web demo of the Practice Velocity suite of urgent care solutions, call today -- (815) 544-7480.