CityMD exits Seattle-Tacoma area; Franciscan Urgent Care replaces some of the sites
After much fanfare in 2018 when it arrived with new clinics, a noted urgent care brand has left the Tacoma area and been replaced with another.
CityMD, formerly with clinics in University Place and Puyallup, among other sites, is now operating as Franciscan Urgent Care.
The change took effect Dec. 31.
In a statement issued Monday, Cary Evans, vice president for communications and government affairs, CHI Franciscan said: “Our Puyallup and University Place urgent care locations continue to provide high-quality, convenient urgent care services to the community. These locations now operate as Franciscan Urgent Care as we align and unify our services.”
Other former CityMD urgent care clinics in West Seattle, Federal Way and Bainbridge Island also are now listed as Franciscan Urgent Care sites, according to an online search Monday.
Not all of the clinics got a second act under the Franciscan brand.
Its Capitol Hill site’s departure was first reported in November by the Capitol Hill Seattle blog. Ravenna and Kent, two of the first CityMD clinics to open in the region, also are no longer CityMD sites.
CityMD launched in 2010 by a group of emergency medicine physicians on the East Coast, and the clinic chain’s entry into the Seattle market in 2016 grew via a partnership with CHI Franciscan.
Its clinics in King and Pierce counties were the only ones in the CityMD network of clinics that were outside the greater New York metro area.
At that time, the clinics were touted by CHI Franciscan as the vanguard of what soon became a wave of new urgent care clinics, including rival MultiCare’s Indigo sites.
CityMD entered the Pierce County medical market in 2018.
The next year brought changes to both the health system and the urgent care clinic brand and, ultimately, CityMD’s departure from the Northwest.
In February 2019, CHI Franciscan became a part of CommonSpirit under an OHCA (Organized Health Care Arrangement) as part of a merger between Catholic Health Initiatives and Dignity.
At that time, CityMD/Franciscan Urgent Care were listed as part of the CommonSpirit OHCA.
In August, CityMD and Summit Medical Group of New Jersey merged.
At the time of the announcement, CityMD and Summit called their merger “the first-of-its-kind between an urgent care provider and an independent physician-owned multispecialty medical group.”
This story was originally published January 7, 2020 at 5:35 AM.
