Launching complex medical workups from an urgent care platform.

Abstract

The basic parameters for medical workups have scarcely changed in the past 30 years. That is, what the internal medicine community has deemed acceptable for outpatient, inpatient, emergency department, and urgent care evaluation has remained pretty much stable or stagnant during all that time. We are failing to take advantage of the phenomenal speed and accuracy of new laboratory and imaging technologies. Due to Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed the Veterans Administration Hospital in New Orleans, those of us who work in its urgent care clinic were forced to undertake complex medical workups from an 8-to-5, walk-in platform. We have been amazed at the efficiency of this. Workups that used to take weeks can often be done in a few hours or days. What we have discovered here serendipitously may be worth deliberately duplicating elsewhere.