From home visits to new clinics, Puget Sound-area providers ‘Uber-izing’ healthcare

While healthcare isn’t getting any less expensive, local medical providers are making it a lot easier to get care — on our terms.

From an explosion of urgent care centers to virtual visits, the medical industry is in the midst of an upheaval unlike anything seen before.

Like a lot of us with kids, Emily Benning wasn’t sure what to do when her two-and-a-half-year-old son got sick.

“He had a little bit of a rash and a little bit of a high fever and it was after hours late one night and we weren’t really sure what was going,” said the Sammamish mom.

In the past, she would have few choices — go to the emergency room or an urgent care.

But instead of reaching for her car keys, she reached for a new app and connected with Swedish Medical Center.

“Everyone was really great. They asked a few preliminary questions to make sure that it was safe for them to come … and then they arrived, I would say, within a half-an-hour,” she said.

You heard right. She didn’t have to go to them. Instead, a nurse practitioner came to her.

Express Care at Home is just one of several news services Swedish is offering to expand access to care on their patient’s terms, said Dr. Sunita Mishra, medical director of innovation for Swedish.

Consider it the Uber-ization of the medical industry.

“The medical field is ripe for innovation. There’s a lot of areas in which healthcare lags behind other consumer industries,” she said.

Mishra spearheaded the expansion of services from online visits with a medical practitioner to urgent-care clinics inside Puget Sound area Walgreens pharmacies.

“The idea is to get closer to our patients. Let’s get closer to the consumer and reduce the friction that currently exists,” she said.

Swedish is far from alone. In Seattle’s Roosevelt neighborhood, a new urgent care clinic called CityMD has just opened.

What makes CityMD different is, unlike other urgent care clinics, it’s staffed by board certified physicians you’d normally only find in an ER or your doctor’s office.

Ketul Patel is the CEO of Tacoma-based CHI Franciscan Health, which partnered with New York-based CityMD to bring the first of what will be a number of clinics to the Puget Sound region.

“We found that having a board-certified, emergency room physician staffing an urgent care was very unique in the market and one that is going to be a trendsetter for the entire Pacific Northwest,” Patel said.

Having a doctor on site allows CityMD to offer far more services than other urgent care, from stitches to setting broken bones.

“All of us find it’s very frustrating to go into an emergency room, sometimes it takes us a long time for us to get into our primary care physician. With this partnership with CityMD and this urgent care that’s opened up in Ravenna, you can literally have an issue and walk right in and you’ll be seen very quickly by a board certified physician that frankly you just don’t have the opportunity to do elsewhere,” Patel said.

All of these services also help control costs for patients and providers alike.

Even if you don’t have insurance, the services are far less expensive than the ER or doctor’s office.

A Swedish Express Care home visit costs just $199 if patients are paying out of pocket.

CityMD’s rates start at $125.

And after a Swedish nurse practitioner came to her home and checked out her son – turns out it was just a cold – Emily Benning’s certainly all for it.

“I would recommend it again, I would do it in a heartbeat again,” she said.

Follow @http://twitter.com/joshkerns38