


“Nearly everyone coming in tells us the pace is too fast,” says Sanders, leaning back in a chair in the Hillsboro office. That growth has been a pain point as Zoom+ integrates what could be three different companies: clinical care, retail delivery and technology development under one roof. “We believe that Zoom+ is the right model for health care in America and throughout the world,” says Sanders in typically grand fashion. While 100% growth in Portland is hard to imagine year after year, Zoom+’s recent management hires - like former Nike vice president David Kohel, retail expert Bill Frerichs, formerly of Target, and the aforementioned McCallion - point to a system ready to scale up and replicate in other markets, perhaps even nationwide. “We have to be 100% better every year or there’s no reason for us to exist.” “We can’t be incrementalists,” he opines. While they won’t reveal revenues, the company has experienced annual growth of up to 100%, Sanders says. Half work in the clinics the rest, including 50 computer engineers, are at the Hillsboro (for now) headquarters. In the last 18 months, Zoom+ has gone from 125 employees to 350. A cash infusion from minority investor Endeavour Capital in 2014 coincided with the company’s exponential growth. Zoom+ was bootstrapped for the first eight years and has operated profitably for the most part. The other two: Salu, a online communication hub for primary care doctors, and MyHealthBank, an early leader in creating Health Savings Accounts, which were launched and eventually sold. Zoom+ is their third business endeavor since meeting as freshmen at the University of Michigan in 1984. What’s more: Zoom+ sidesteps one of the big challenges facing our uber-challenged (pun intended) medical delivery system - how do you pay for everyone, the sick, the elderly and the infirm? Zoom+ takes themselves out of that discussion by focusing on the demographic of the moment: young, healthy millennials.įast-talking, confident and mission obsessed, Sanders, a physician who started his medical career in Multnomah County’s urgent-care clinics, is the perfect foil to Zoom+’s co-founder and chief medical officer, the quiet, nebbishy, Albert DiPiero. Health care is serious, as serious as a heart attack. But the stakes here feel higher than a shopping trip or a taxi ride or a hotel room. They want to reshape it all - primary care, pediatrics, specialty medicine, emergency, imaging and insurance, the entire health care stack - with a customer-centric, tech-heavy retail approach.Īmazon, Uber, Netflix and countless others have walked this road before, reinventing their industries for the smartphone, streaming and ubiquitous app generation. Their success has caught the eye - and ire - of local hospitals that have answered back with their own brands of web-enabled, customer-facing, retail-style urgentcare clinics.īut Zoom+’s goals are bigger and bolder. It’s grown from a single clinic in Bridgeport Village to 32 distributed around Portland, Salem and Seattle. The company has already successfully orchestrated an urgent care do-over, delivering it faster, cheaper and more beautifully to an increasing number of tech-savvy customers. That move, as well as recent top-level hires from retail powerhouses Target and Nike, signal Zoom+’s intent. “They’re pretty rough,” apologizes Ziba Design’s former creative director, and you can almost hear him mentally counting the days until January 1, 2017, when Zoom+ flees to its new headquarters in the Pearl. No, what’s bothering McCallion is the meeting’s location, plain vanilla offices in ho-hum Hillsboro. He’s gung ho about Zoom+’s bold plans to expand the model beyond urgent care and bring a shopper’s approach to every aspect of the health care system. In a decade the company has turned a necessary nuisance, an unexpected trip to a health clinic, into a painless, customer-facing retail experience. To the contrary: Hired 18 months ago as chief member officer and creative director, McCallion is extraordinarily excited by Zoom+’s reinvention of urgent care. Sanders’ unflagging enthusiasm is not what’s making McCallion fidget. He speaks energetically and enthusiastically, deploying inspirational anecdotes, statistics and nonstop jargon to rally the room around the company’s successes and challenges. Zoom+’s co-founder, Dave Sanders, 51, dressed in “medical casual” (a scrubs-inspired T-shirt and jeans) takes the stage. It’s the Zoom+ weekly all-hands meeting, and team leaders are reporting on key performance indicators.
