Urgent Care Center Malpractice Insurance
The field of urgent care is growing rapidly, as a more cost-effective alternative to emergency room treatment. Urgent care facilities often treat walk-in patients without appointments, and typically operate on an extended-hours basis. Their patients typically require immediate medical attention for minor injuries that don’t warrant a visit to an emergency room. Delivering outpatient medical care in a dedicated facility requires medical malpractice insurance to mitigate the risks of a liability lawsuit.
Essentially, the urgent care facility is an intermediate step between emergency rooms and retail clinics. In order to qualify as an urgent care facility, the practice must have a licensed physician onsite during operating hours, accept walk-in patients of all ages for a variety of injuries and illnesses, have x-ray and certain other specialized equipment available onsite and operated seven days per week. The classification was created to ease the load burden on emergency rooms around the country. Many proponents of urgent care facilities stress the importance of a strong communication system between hospitals, primary care physicians and urgent care centers, in order to provide for efficiency of the system.
At present, there are nearly 10,000 urgent care centers in the United States, servicing over 100 million patients per year. This number is growing steadily by about 300 new centers per year. The most commonly treated ailments are bone fractures, back pain, sprains and strains, contusions, fevers and upper respiratory tract infections. (1)
The Urgent Care Association of America reports that the majority of urgent care centers were launched by emergency physicians who saw a need for affordable, walk-in medical treatment and knew that hospital emergency departments weren’t up to handling the requirement. Most are owned by physicians or a group of physicians, with approximately 25% being owned by hospitals. The hospital-owned centers are usually located remotely from the main hospital campus. At present, urgent care is not recognized as a specialty in its own right, but such recognition may come from the American Medical Association.
Urgent care physicians are considered to be in the middle of the risk spectrum for medical malpractice insurance. Consequently, medical malpractice insurance for urgent care centers and physicians can also be found to be in the middle of the cost spectrum, depending upon region, scope of treatment and other factors.
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Medical Liability and Adverse Medical Events