Nearly two years after announcing a partnership with Amazon’s One Medical, Tacoma, Wash.-based Virginia Mason Franciscan Health says the collaboration is driving steady patient growth, expanding primary care access and pushing the health system to adapt more quickly to consumer expectations.
The partnership, launched in 2023, gave One Medical members in the Seattle area direct access to Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s network of more than 2,000 specialists. One Medical, acquired by Amazon that same year, has sought to combine technology-enabled care with in-person services.
Tom Kruse, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, said the relationship has matured into a growth engine for the health system.
“We’re now up to about 35 primary care providers for One Medical in the Seattle metro market, and that’s yielding about 350 net new patients per month,” Mr. Kruse told Becker’s. “These are patients that haven’t come to us in the last three years. They tend to be almost exclusively commercially insured, which is advantageous.”
Mr. Kruse said the partnership has increased total primary care in the market by more than 25% while maintaining competitive costs compared to Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s employed physician model.
“Even though we have a contract that pays them for essentially providing primary care for us, they are highly competitive with our employee model,” he said. “It has all the things you would desire from a successful creative practice without being an employed model.”
Mr. Kruse noted that about 40% of One Medical visits in the region now happen virtually, which has challenged some traditional assumptions about care delivery.
“It’s shown us a lot more about the future of the industry, what’s possible, and has challenged our status quo assumptions,” he said. “We’ve seen that patients are happy when they don’t have to disrupt their real lives to come into an office.”
The collaboration has also forced Virginia Mason Franciscan Health to sharpen its specialty care access.
“It’s made us better at specialty and ancillary access than we were before,” Mr. Kruse said. “We now have an outside party who’s very consumer-minded, constantly reminding us what the consumer expectation is, and it’s causing us to be better at our game of getting people access when they need it.”
Looking ahead, Mr. Kruse said One Medical’s disciplined approach to site selection and employer relationships points to continued growth in the region. The two organizations are also exploring ways to better align on senior care through One Medical for Seniors, formerly Iora Health.
While acknowledging that partnerships with large companies like Amazon can require health systems to adapt, Mr. Kruse said the collaboration has reinforced Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s need to be nimble.
“It’s made us reexamine the things that we say are nonnegotiable versus what are just business preferences,” he said. “It’s made us more nimble, and that’s a good skill for us to learn.”
