Dignity Health Announces Urgent Care Partnership

The urgent care centers will be a 50/50 partnership, with Dignity Health Medical Foundation providing the clinicians, GoHealth providing the organizational infrastructure and expertise, and both entities equally sharing the capital investment.

Non-profit Dignity Health and investor-owned GoHealth Urgent Care will partner to operate one dozen urgent care centers in the San Francisco Bay area, the two providers have announced.

The locations for the 12 urgent care centers have yet to be determined, but that process is expected to be finalized over the next 15 months, says Todd Strumwasser, Sr., MD, Dignity Health vice president of operations for the Bay Area.

Strumwasser says the Bay Area could be a ripe market for urgent care.

"We had a study done by an outside agency that showed that San Francisco was underpenetrated in urgent care centers," he says. "This is just a guess, but our competitors may have been worried about the cannibalism of whatever primary care services they were already providing in this niche. Our concern is more making sure that patients get the right level of care at the right location rather than any potential cannibalization."

Strumwasser says the partnership allows Dignity to tap into the retail experience of Atlanta-based GoHealth, which already operates urgent care centers in New York and Oregon with non-profit health system partners.

"One of the things we believe at Dignity Health is healthcare is a very complex team sport," Strumwasser says. "Rather than learning on our own how to do this in an expert fashion we feel it is more efficient to partner with those who actually have a track record and proven expertise in the field of running and choosing the proper urgent care center locations. This partnership feels like it accomplishes that for us. They have the appropriate level of expertise and the track record to ensure a successful deployment of these assets in the Bay Area."

In exchange for that expertise, Strumwasser says GoHealth can tap into the strong community ties and reputation that come with the Dignity Health brand.

"All of us are trying to make healthcare less fragmented. The better you can partner urgent care with a larger healthcare delivery system, with post-acute care and home care and care coordination, the better the experience is going to be for the patient," he says. "Through this partnership, these patients will have better access to Dignity Health specialists and acute care facilities so it will make a more seamless experience for the communities we serve."

Strumwasser says the urgent care centers could prove amenable for the young professionals in the region's high tech industry who want convenient access to healthcare. "They're busy urban professionals who are looking to have healthcare come to them and the best that we can do with that is position these urgent care centers in locations that make it easy to provide them with accessible points of entry into healthcare delivery," he says.

The Right Care in the Right Locations
The urgent care centers will be a 50/50 partnership, with Dignity Health Medical Foundation providing the clinicians, GoHealth providing the organizational infrastructure and expertise, and both entities equally sharing the capital investment.

The urgent care centers don't have a name yet, but Strumwasser says they'll "be reflective of the partnership between Dignity Health and GoHealth."

"We have a strong brand in the communities we serve and we want to leverage that, making sure that patients understand that when they come to a Dignity facility, be it an urgent care center or an acute care hospital, they are going to get the same type of human kindness that they are going to get at all locations," he says.

Strumwasser says an early metric to demonstrate that the urgent care centers are working could be lower volumes at Dignity Health emergency departments "because really what this is about is patients not going to one of our EDs if that is not the level of care they need."

"We hope the communities we serve don't need our acute care hospitals, but we want them to receive the right care in the right locations with the right amount of resources every time," he says. "The way that you do that is you don't have patients with sore throats and sprained ankles in our EDs were they are going to have to pay more and wait longer and be inconvenienced. Urgent care is a way to deliver lower acuity care to patients at an affordable price in a more accessible location."

The urgent care centers will be open for "extended hours" seven days a week, with lab and imaging services, and integration with Dignity Health's electronic medical records systems. The will be staffed by physician-supervised nurse practitioners and physician assistants. "We will have people operating at the top of their license and making sure we have the right staffing ratios to take appropriate care of patients," Strumwasser says.

GoHealth's other nonprofit partners include New York's Northwell Health, and Portland's Legacy Health. Dignity Health is one of the nation's largest health systems, including more than 400 care centers in 21 states, with 9,000 allied physicians and 56,000 employees.