After a pilot project at 2 of its locations, ZoomCare—which offers urgent care, primary care, emergency, and specialty care—has started accepting Medicare and Medicare Advantage patients across its entire network of 45 centers in Oregon and Washington, according to a press release. ZoomCare initially started with 1 urgent care location in 2006 targeting Millennials, and by 2018, the original founders had sold the organization to the local Catholic health system PeaceHealth. A large part of the shift toward the Medicare market included a transition of the company’s proprietary EMR to an integrated third-party platform to ensure it could serve the senior population. ZoomCare currently treats 187,000 patients annually.
Tech backbone for scale: “Over the past decade, the government—through carrots and sticks—has incentivized medical providers to adopt electronic medical records. Not only do these actions influence practices that document on paper, but they also influence practices that may have adopted their own in-house EMR,” says Alan Ayers, President of Urgent Care Consultants and Senior Editor of JUCM. “It’s becoming cost-prohibitive for an operator to comply with all standards on their own, but by adopting standard, SaaS, or off-the-shelf software, the expertise and technical resources required for privacy, security, clearinghouse connectivity, and all other functions are shared with all other users of the third-party EMR.”