ZoomCare Now Accepting Medicare and Medicare Advantage; Seeks to Add Puget Sound Clinics

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ZoomCare eyes more local clinics

In addition to providing urgent care, ZoomCare offers primary care, mental health, dermatology, podiatry, and women’s health services. Its Super clinics, including one in Bellevue and two in the Portland area, handle most emergency needs, including intake, lab work, X-rays, CAT scans, ultrasounds, or other procedures, according to a news release. Super clinics also are staffed with board-certified emergency room physicians. Fee likened the Super clinics to halfway between an urgent care clinic and full-blown hospital ER, and less expensive and faster for patients.

The Puget Sound market is a key growth target for ZoomCare, including for Super clinics, Fee said.

“We’d like to double our footprint in the Puget Sound market in the next five years,” for all types of clinics, he said

ZoomCare is considering where it could strategically place one or more Super clinics in the region to help reduce the load on overburdened hospital emergency rooms, Fee said.

“We want to work in partnership with the health systems that are actually there to figure out a way for us to strategically place our Super clinic so that it actually serves as a meaningful emergency diversion strategy, because emergency rooms are backed up and patients … they're not being seen in a timely fashion, and it's hurting the hospitals, it's hurting the patients — and so the Super clinic is a really elegant solution for that particular front,” he said.

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The relationship would be reciprocal, as ZoomCare Super clinics refer patients with life-threatening or other serious medical needs to ERs.

“Part of our deal is that we really want to promote continuity of care" and improve patient access, Fee said. “And so we want to work proactively with any and all the providers that are in the communities where we share patients.”

ZoomCare annually has more than 465,000 visits and sees 187,000 patients. Founded in 2006, it has about 650 employees. In addition to its 20 clinics in Puget Sound, the company has three clinics in Vancouver, Washington; 20 in the Portland area; and one each in Salem and Springfield, Oregon.

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