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Urgent care center wait times increase for COVID-19 results in August 2020, with rapid testing availability limited

BACKGROUND: In a response to the pandemic, urgent care centers (UCCs) have gained a critical role as a common location for COVID-19 testing. We sought to characterize the changes in testing accessibility at UCCs between March and August 2020 on the basis of testing availability (including rapid anti...

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Autores principales: Yousman, Laurie C, Khunte, Akshay, Hsiang, Walter, Jain, Siddharth, Forman, Howard, Wiznia, Daniel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8027963/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33832506
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06338-y
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author Yousman, Laurie C
Khunte, Akshay
Hsiang, Walter
Jain, Siddharth
Forman, Howard
Wiznia, Daniel
author_facet Yousman, Laurie C
Khunte, Akshay
Hsiang, Walter
Jain, Siddharth
Forman, Howard
Wiznia, Daniel
author_sort Yousman, Laurie C
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: In a response to the pandemic, urgent care centers (UCCs) have gained a critical role as a common location for COVID-19 testing. We sought to characterize the changes in testing accessibility at UCCs between March and August 2020 on the basis of testing availability (including rapid antigen testing), wait time for test results, cost of visits, and cost of tests. METHODS: Data were collected using a secret shopper methodology. Researchers contacted 250 UCCs in 10 states. Investigators used a standardized script to survey centers on their COVID-19 testing availability and policies. UCCs were initially contacted in March and re-called in August. T-tests and chi-square tests were conducted to identify differences between March and August data and differences by center classification. RESULTS: Our results indicate that both polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to detect COVID-19 genetic material and rapid antigen COVID-19 tests have increased in availability. However, wait times for PCR test results have significantly increased to an average of 5.79 days. Additionally, a high proportion of UCCs continue to charge for tests and visits and no significant decrease was found in the proportion of UCCs that charge for COVID-19 testing from March to August. Further, no state reported a majority of UCCs with rapid testing available, indicating an overall lack of rapid testing. CONCLUSIONS: From March to August, COVID-19 testing availability gradually improved. However, many barriers lie in access to COVID-19 testing, including testing costs, visit costs, and overall lack of availability of rapid testing in the majority of UCCs. Despite the passage of the CARES Act, these results suggest that there is room for additional policy to improve accessibility to testing, specifically rapid testing.
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spelling pubmed-80279632021-04-08 Urgent care center wait times increase for COVID-19 results in August 2020, with rapid testing availability limited Yousman, Laurie C Khunte, Akshay Hsiang, Walter Jain, Siddharth Forman, Howard Wiznia, Daniel BMC Health Serv Res Research Article BACKGROUND: In a response to the pandemic, urgent care centers (UCCs) have gained a critical role as a common location for COVID-19 testing. We sought to characterize the changes in testing accessibility at UCCs between March and August 2020 on the basis of testing availability (including rapid antigen testing), wait time for test results, cost of visits, and cost of tests. METHODS: Data were collected using a secret shopper methodology. Researchers contacted 250 UCCs in 10 states. Investigators used a standardized script to survey centers on their COVID-19 testing availability and policies. UCCs were initially contacted in March and re-called in August. T-tests and chi-square tests were conducted to identify differences between March and August data and differences by center classification. RESULTS: Our results indicate that both polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to detect COVID-19 genetic material and rapid antigen COVID-19 tests have increased in availability. However, wait times for PCR test results have significantly increased to an average of 5.79 days. Additionally, a high proportion of UCCs continue to charge for tests and visits and no significant decrease was found in the proportion of UCCs that charge for COVID-19 testing from March to August. Further, no state reported a majority of UCCs with rapid testing available, indicating an overall lack of rapid testing. CONCLUSIONS: From March to August, COVID-19 testing availability gradually improved. However, many barriers lie in access to COVID-19 testing, including testing costs, visit costs, and overall lack of availability of rapid testing in the majority of UCCs. Despite the passage of the CARES Act, these results suggest that there is room for additional policy to improve accessibility to testing, specifically rapid testing. BioMed Central 2021-04-08 /pmc/articles/PMC8027963/ /pubmed/33832506 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06338-y Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Yousman, Laurie C
Khunte, Akshay
Hsiang, Walter
Jain, Siddharth
Forman, Howard
Wiznia, Daniel
Urgent care center wait times increase for COVID-19 results in August 2020, with rapid testing availability limited
title Urgent care center wait times increase for COVID-19 results in August 2020, with rapid testing availability limited
title_full Urgent care center wait times increase for COVID-19 results in August 2020, with rapid testing availability limited
title_fullStr Urgent care center wait times increase for COVID-19 results in August 2020, with rapid testing availability limited
title_full_unstemmed Urgent care center wait times increase for COVID-19 results in August 2020, with rapid testing availability limited
title_short Urgent care center wait times increase for COVID-19 results in August 2020, with rapid testing availability limited
title_sort urgent care center wait times increase for covid-19 results in august 2020, with rapid testing availability limited
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8027963/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33832506
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-06338-y
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