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Summer Medical Practices: Ounce of Prevention - Pound of Cure

Posted by Tom Lombardo | Tue, Jun 17, 2014 @ 10:00 AM

Medical PracticeWith summertime in full swing medical clinics across the country prepare for a stream of accidents and afflictions that could have been prevented with a little careful forethought.

“Careful” is the keyword, because many families misunderstand the risks themselves and prepare for summertime problems in the wrong way.  If you provide your clients with a list of preventable summertime dangers, perhaps via a blog or newsletter, we hope that our collection may be of use to you, since it highlights some of the less-obvious threats. Feel free to copy it wherever you’d like:

  • Heat kills more people annually than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes combined, and the elderly are by far the most at risk. As we age our ability to regulate body temperature declines along with our ability to perceive that we’re thirsty, elevating the risk of dehydration or hyperthermia. These risks are even higher for those who are overweight and those with heart conditions.
  • Predictably, 60% of all fireworks accidents take place around the Fourth of July. Three quarters of the injured are male, a third of them less than 15 years old. You’d expect errant explosions to cause burns and lost fingers, but the second most common injury is foreign objects embedded in the eyes. Sparklers, which many parents consider as safe as a candle, caused 600 emergency room visits over the holiday last year.
  • Contrary to popular belief, of all bicycle accidents only 11% involve a car, with nearly half of those taking place in an intersection. Despite bicyclists’ (or their parents’) widespread fear of getting hit from behind that happens in less than 2% of car-related accidents. In reality solo wipeouts account for 73% of bicycle accidents, and 14% of the time the bicyclist runs into a tree or some other stationary object.
  • Every five days this summer a child will drown in a shallow, inches-deep portable pool.
  • In 2012 80,000 kids ended up in the emergency room because of a skateboarding accident, and another 95,000 were there because of a trampoline.
  • Bears no longer hesitate to confront campers to take their food.
  • DEET is one of the safest ways to avoid insect bites, so long as the ointment has a very low concentration of the active ingredient. Products boasting higher concentrations may be dangerous. And while mosquito bites are rarely dangerous, we now have microscopic proof that they’re truly gross:

Clearly “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” only when you’re working to prevent the actual risk as opposed to the perception – or misperception – of one. Of course you have great-grandma sitting in the shade, but what you really need to do is make sure she’s drinking plenty of water. Of course you teach your child to walk her bike across the street (while wearing a helmet), but the real lesson ought to be how to power-slide to a stop if she suddenly finds herself hurtling towards a tree or parked car.

Even those people who get everything right and do their best to prevent every possible accident will often end up at your office. Distraught, dumbfounded, embarrassed and extremely worried, they may be confronting the cosmic reality that bad things happen to good people while they watch you assist their afflicted loved one.

And of course you jump into action as soon as you’re needed. It’s your nature to do so.

It’s our nature to make sure you get paid for it. We’ve been processing checks for decades, and we’ve got you covered for the risk you already know about and for the one you might have missed. If we verify a check under a check guarantee agreement, it means you get paid. That’s obvious.

But we also know that the last thing you want to have happen is for an emotional client to hand you his check, knowing full well that it is good, and to have your check verification service generate what we call an unnecessary decline. Few things anger people more quickly, or more deeply, than the implication that they are trying to pass a bad check. For that to happen in the middle of an already emotional situation could be catastrophic to your relationship with the whole family.

We specifically set out to prevent encounters like that by providing the highest check verification approval rate in the industry, and we’ve bundled our services into a tailor-made package just for your medical practice. Learn more here.

Medical Remote Deposit Capture Insider's Guide

Topics: Medical

Written by Tom Lombardo