Tag Archives: injury

Health, News

Portland’s ZoomCare Opens Clinic in Qliance’s Boutique Health Care Backyard

Heading to Blue Moon Burgers on Broadway, on Capitol Hill, the other day, I passed a “store” called ZoomCare, that upon further inspection sold health care. Eating at burger joints always puts me in the mindset to research low-cost health care options, so I resolved to take a look at this interloper once back at the office.

Founded by two dollar-squeezing Portland doctors in 2006, ZoomCare tries a slightly different approach than Seattle’s Qliance, when it comes to offering the range of primary care that most people need, and for which a hospital visit is overkill, if you’ll pardon the expression. Where Qliance charges a month-to-month “membership” fee (ranging from $64 to $89 per month for adults on its Level 1 plan, after a one-time $99 registration), ZoomCare is completely a la carte.

For an office visit for illness, injury, or checkup, it’s $99 if you pay cash (they’re also an in-network resource for a range of insurers, as well, in which case it’s just a co-pay or deductible). You can schedule a 15-minute appointment online, and can walk in and get seen at that moment. If that’s too much trouble, you can also get a Skype consult for $49. (ZoomCare suggests this option for: “Sore throat, bladder infections, urinary tract infections, rashes, skin infections, sinusitis, pink eye, sprains, swimmer’s ear, minor headaches, upper respiratory infections, allergies, bronchitis, minor diarrhea, vaginal yeast infections, acne, cold sores.”)

Qliance, founded in resistance to the middleman waste inherent in the insurance system (“Oh! See him transferring administrative costs to me? Help! Help! I’m being cost-externalized!”), spends more time educating clients on high-deductible and health savings account strategies. While they are also focused on seeing the patient on schedule, the membership model is supposed to create an unrushed atmosphere, where your doctor takes the time really to see you.

The ZoomCare clinics have been popular in Portland, springing up everywhere. (Qliance now has clinics in downtown Seattle, Kent, Mercer Island, Mill Creek, and Tacoma, and is said to be “scouting clinic locations across the country.”) The low- and fixed-cost appeal is undeniable, although ZoomCare has gotten rapped for its refusal to deal with Medicaid, and for over-working staff. They are not the Country Doctor, for instance, the non-profit that provides “culturally appropriate primary health care that addresses the needs of all people regardless of their ability to pay.”

At ZoomCare’s Capitol Hill clinic (531 Broadway East, Suite 10), you’ll see David Feig, MD, Erin Grindle, PA-C and Katie Shaw, ARNP, for everything from asthma and ear infections to sprains and cuts. In short, it’s all the little things you might let progress to becoming a serious thing because of the high cost of health care, and the concomitant insecurity about how much this is all going to cost, which you often find out after the fact in a hospital setting, when you’re already on the hook for it.

All this is good on paper, but with health care, the main thing is that it actually work for you, and there’s nothing like first-person experience to determine if that’s the case. One thing that Yelp reviews make clear is that they are not an emergency room–if it is serious, they are not your first choice. (Qliance’s coordination with needed hospital care may be differentiator here.) But for minor in-and-outs, the price seems to be right.

News, Transportation

The Surprising Truth About Bicycling in Seattle

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(Photo: Great_Beyond, from our Flickr pool)

This factoid jumped out at me from the Seattle Department of Transportation’s 2010 Traffic Report. Guess what the weather was like when 71 percent of all car-bicycle collisions took place? Clear or partly cloudy. Fourteen percent of collisions occurred when it was overcast. Only twelve percent when it was rainy.

You just assume that the weather is bad, it’s slippery, there’ll be more accidents. But no. In Seattle, looking at the absolute numbers, high season for bicycle-related accidents for the past five years are the months May through September, with April and October as the shoulders. That makes sense in one way because there are simply more cyclists out and about when the weather is nice.

Image from SDOT's 2010 Traffic Report

But consider the statistics for pedestrians, who are also, you assume, out and about when the weather is nice. Seattle is flush with tourists not looking where they are going each summer. Yet the pedestrian high (-chance-of-being-hit) season is the months November through January. Again, common sense, except you might apply the same common sense to bicyclists (weather’s bad, it’s dark, can’t be seen) and be wrong.

Nor does clothing visibility seem, in this batch of statistics, to offer much of an advantage. Of the collisions where the bicyclist’s clothing was noted, 35 were wearing light or reflective clothing compared to 42 wearing dark clothing, and 122 who were wearing “mixed” light and dark clothing. The lesson seems to be to go bright or go ninja, but don’t hedge your bets.

Most dangerous day of the week? Wednesday. Least dangerous? Sunday (I would guess simply because of lower traffic volumes). Most dangerous hours of the day? 8 to 9 a.m., and 3 to 7 p.m. The leading age group for accidents is 25-34.

The leading reason a driver hit a bicyclist (142 times) was given as failure to grant the right of way. But before cyclists get their chamois-padded bike briefs in a twist, consider this: in 66 collisions, the bicyclist failed to grant the right of way to a pedestrian. The collision was most likely to happen at an intersection (60 percent), and another surprise, more likely to happen when bicyclists were riding with traffic (32 percent) than entering or crossing traffic (18 percent).

That said, SDOT’s data can be surprisingly incomplete. In the last instance, 45 percent of the time, no one knew or wrote down what the cyclist was doing–a startling omission given that these are car vs. bike collisions. The age of the bicylist was undetermined 21 percent of the time. 45 percent of the time the “facility type” (e.g., roadway, bike route) was missing.

I would also take issue with SDOT’s assertion that “the citywide count showed a decline in bicycling” of 15 percent. A one-day count is really only useful for establishing the presence of something. Whatever else is true, citywide, some 3,961 people biked around Seattle on a particular day in 2010. But you can’t be sure, by comparison solely to previous one-day counts, whether you’re really seeing an increase or decrease. That’s true as well of the 20 percent “uptick” in bike commuters to downtown, of 3,251. Maybe it is an increase. But really, it’s more important to know that 3,251 people biked to downtown. So when people tell you how impossible it is to commute to downtown on a bike, you have 3,251 comebacks.