January 16, 2025
ZoomCare
425Business
By John Stearns, 425 Business, January 16, 2025
ZoomCare, which operates a network of clinics in Washington and Oregon providing urgent, primary, and other care, announced today that it has begun accepting Medicare and Medicare Advantage patients at all of its 45 locations, including 20 in the Puget Sound region that stretch from Tukwila to Lynnwood, and West Seattle to Redmond.
“We had a lot of patients that actually used to come see us that rolled under the Medicare ranks and can’t see us anymore — and when you look at the challenges for a Medicare patient, there are a lot of practices that have restricted their Medicare panel because they do get paid less” in reimbursements, Jeff Fee, CEO of Tigard, Oregon-based ZoomCare, said in an interview.
“So because our model is so efficient, we're like, ‘Why would we not be offering this model to the Medicare patient population?” Fee said. “They deserve to have as good of access as everybody else does, and we want to make health care simple for this massively growing patient population. We want to continue being relevant to all of our patients, but it was just a glaring hole in our offering in terms of not being able to provide these services for this particular and extremely fast-growing patient population. … We’re just really thrilled to be able to offer our services to the Medicare patient population.”
ZoomCare decided a couple years ago that it wanted to begin accepting Medicare patients, but first had to determine requirements, one of which was implementing a Medicare-compliant electronic health records system. ZoomCare last summer transitioned to Athenahealth for that and piloted the software platform at its Woodinville and Edmonds clinics and began seeing Medicare patients there. Based on the pilot’s success, ZoomCare launched Medicare acceptance companywide, starting with Medicare last December and adding Medicare Advantage this month.
About 20% of the population in Washington and Oregon was enrolled in Medicare or Medicare Advantage plans last year, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data cited by ZoomCare. That’s about 2.5 million people.
Using the certified software platform also opens the door for ZoomCare to partner with large health systems and insurance plans to increase patient access to primary, urgent, emergency, and specialty care, the company said in a news release.
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.
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.
ZoomCare® is the leading provider of on-demand retail and digital healthcare, providing urgent care, primary care, specialty care, mental health, telemedicine, and more at zoomcare.com. For more updates, follow us on social media at @zoomcare. Direct all press requests to press@zoomcare.com.
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