-limited access to resources which means you are often left seeing patients without the tools you need (I.e. incredibly unreliable imaging). ZoomCare expects you to see these patients and bill them for a visit without being able to properly rule out their basic diagnosis, such as fracture or pneumonia (the bread and butter of urgent care).
-providers will not work to the full scope of their license. This could be a pro or con depending how you look at it. Easy workload overall, but Zoomcare wants every provider to practice the same and expects you to follow their “learning bites” on how to manage common conditions. If you veer from the learning bites, you risk having a quality report written up on you, which will stay on your file indefinitely and sometimes results in you needing to meet with management about it. These quality reports are never educational, and they are more often the result of a coworker disagreeing with how you handled something.
-managers are hired from outside retail companies and have no medical background. They are then the ones advising you to code visits higher, see more patients, and use less charting breaks without any true understanding of the provider’s role (or how to properly code a visit so as not to commit fraud).
-big brother vibe: management will track how long you spend with patients and use that to determine if you have time to see more patients. What they fail to realize is the visit doesn’t end when the patient walks out the door - there is charting to do as well as lab/imaging interpretation. Management will micromanage you like you are not a well educated professional who has gone through 6-8 years of education to be in this role.
-ZoomCare is now prioritizing primary care/family medicine without the basic infrastructure needed to provide this in a safe and effective way. No continuity of care- everyone sees each other’s patients. No referrals coordinator or anyone to help you set your patient up for success. A lot of the administrative work falls on the providers and can be time consuming, which again is lost on the managers when they are tracking the minutes of your day.
-clinic staff will work one weekend day every single weekend. Despite the majority of providers not liking this schedule, management has shown no interest in revamping the schedules to better match industry standards.
-management would rather lose productive providers than try to keep providers happy and therefore retain them (I.e. not open to discussion regarding change in schedule, will keep providers at clinics that are not a good fit for them rather than relocating them). This leads to understaffing when providers continue to quit and therefore causes more burnout for the remaining providers.
-With yearly raises, management will consistently tell everyone “you got the highest raise possible”. However, they must not realize everyone talks and quickly learns they’ve been lied to when their colleagues in the same role were all told that but received very different percentages. This created a level of distrust between providers and management.
-Hasty business decisions in my time at Zoomcare lead to a feeling of whiplash. They would go from one business idea to the next without much notice. One minute their focus is urgent care, the next it’s family medicine and they are selecting multiple clinics to become family medicine clinics without considering if those providers want to have an entirely new role or even have experience for that new role. Lots of unexpected clinic and service line closures shortly after hiring people for these roles too.
-recent changes to scheduling for patients is ultimately going to make ZoomCare perform like any other urgent care - long wait times, overworked providers. Patients love that ZoomCare is “zoomy” for their needs - take that away, and I’m not sure why any one would choose them over other urgent cares.
-safety concerns: there are usually only 2 clinic staff (including the provider) in clinic at any given time. There have been issues with angry patients assaulting and harassing clinic staff without much follow up or change in policy from management. Patients are allowed to be verbally abusive to staff at one clinic and then be sent to another clinic with a forewarning from management “to be extra nice to this patient because they had a bad experience at another clinic”. They do not tell clinic staff what happened. This is blatant disrespect for the safety of clinic staff.
-there are providers who refuse to provide gender affirming care to trans patients. This is unacceptable and incredibly harmful, especially if ZoomCare wants to function as a primary care clinic.
