Venture Partner Perspectives: Dr. Richard Park (Founder of CityMD)

Welcome to FundRx Venture Partner Perspectives, where a FundRx team member conducts a brief interview with a FundRx Venture Partner, with the aim being to share the knowledge and opinions of a diverse array of healthcare clinical and industry experts. Subsequently, we hope these interviews spur further thought and potential innovation and action in the areas discussed.

This interview features Dr. Richard Park, the Founder of CityMD, the leading urgent care provider in the New York Metro Area and Seattle, Washington. He is board-certified in emergency medicine and completed his medical studies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Dr. Park studied emergency medicine in the Long Island Jewish Medical Center’s residency program, where he served as chief resident. He then worked as the Associate Program Director of the residency program in NS-LIJ’s emergency department and was awarded the Teaching Attending of the Year Award by his residents in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006.

CityMD and Summit Medical Group (a premier independent multispecialty practice) recently announced their merger.

Dr. Park, the former CEO of CityMD, will now serve as the Vice-Chairman of the combined organization.

To connect with Dr. Park, email him at rpark@citymd.net.

**This interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity.**

Chris: Can you contextualize the consolidation trend within the healthcare industry, with the recent news on Summit Medical Group and CityMD merging?

Rich: A lot of healthcare solutions are segmented, like, for example, telemedicine or revenue cycle management. We place a lot of importance on specialization and being really good at one thing. But healthcare suffers from being too fragmented. If healthcare is a puzzle, each piece should certainly be of high quality, but it’s critical to put each of those pieces together.

And this is the story of CityMD. We are vertical integrators, and we concentrate on specific geographies so that we can better meet the needs of our patients. Instead of opening clinics all across the US, we believe it’s more effective to have, say, 200 clinics operating within one particular geography, and to build upon the services offered at each site.

So the Summit-CityMD deal makes sense because it enables us to take patients through more of their healthcare journey, from their first walk-in visit to complicated cancer care.

Chris: Is there still room for independent practices to exist given the consolidation trend?

Rich: Yes, but it’s certainly more challenging than it once was. I know of many thriving independent practices that provide excellent care to patients who are accessing good payor rates by joining independent physician associations (IPAs).

Then, of course, there are those that form concierge practices that charge wealthier patients what basically amounts to as yearly retainer fees.

Chris: Given CityMD “disrupted” the patient’s traditional view of primary care, it would be great to get your view on where else on the provider side this might be happening.

Rich: There’s a lot of integration across specialties, such as urgent care, dermatology, and orthopedic practices — to name a few. And there are many innovative primary care offerings, as well as integrated delivery networks (e.g. primary care offered alongside other sub-specialties), which I’m a big believer in.

These networks aren’t particularly widespread. Summit Medical and CareMount are examples. Iora Health and Oak Street Health are well-regarded from an innovative delivery standpoint.

ChenMed’s approach to senior care is also intriguing and inspiring. And Kelsey-Seybold Clinic is a highly-regarded multispecialty group and has worked within an HMO model for decades with great success, taking the full risk with a lot of patients.

Chris: In your mind, what does a 10-star medical clinic visit look like?

Rich: We have to integrate the best of all worlds, make healthcare go from Blockbuster to Netflix.

For example, my dad is 80 years old, medically complicated. He lives with me, and when I occasionally take an extra day to prescribe him his medications, he gets impatient. And instead of coming upstairs to ask me about his prescriptions, he’ll go to CityMD and get some lab work, or X-rays, or an EKG done.

And one time he had some abnormal lab results for his kidneys, and I got a call from our partners who manage our lab work. They mentioned that they had been tracking abnormal results for him for the past few visits, and asked if I had been aware of this. I hadn’t been, and, ultimately, the CityMD team took over my father’s care as they had a closer understanding of him as a patient than I did, even though I live with him and they had primarily managed his care over the phone.

So how do you combine this telemedicine experience with a brick-and-mortar experience? And how do you make that model easy for a patient to navigate?

Right now, multimodal communication pathways are of a keen focus on healthcare.

For example, one of our services is called Aftercare, a CRM combined with a call center, which we created to tie up loose ends for our patients after they leave our clinics. Aftercare supports our brick-and-mortar services. But what they did with my dad, and patients similar to him is actually flip that modality so that the call center is the brains of the operation, and the brick-and-mortar services operate in a supporting role.

So a patient can call, text, or email us, and then be supported by the physical clinics. And that’s why density matters; we’re a logistics company and have a clinic within 15 minutes of nearly every person in the New York Metropolitan Area.

And given our merger with Summit Medical Group, patients will now be able to receive quality, convenient care in virtually every sub-specialty.

Chris: I’d love to hear you describe what your current day-to-day looks like, and what’s most exciting to you and your team.

Rich: I try to split my days into thirds. One third is spent with my direct reports, another at the actual CityMD sites with the front-line staff. And then the rest is spent with more of an external focus — meeting potential partners, learning about what other companies are doing.

Chris: Looking back at your experience scaling CityMD, what are some learnings that are obvious in hindsight that were not so clear as you grew the business? As a physician-entrepreneur, what are some of the guiding principles that helped you transition from provider to founder/CEO?

Rich: When I started CityMD in 2010 alongside some fellow physicians, we had a lot to learn, having been strictly clinical physicians before. We were punching above our weight class, but we knew urgent care was a hot industry. The key lesson when we were starting out was to find great people and retain them.

Our starting team of physicians were all friends and had worked together years prior in the crucible of the ER, so we knew we were in this together. If someone was sick or needed time off, another team member would step up and sacrifice their own time and well-being to look out for their colleagues.

We recognized that, as the company evolved, our roles might change, and the c-suite might look different as more experienced professionals were brought in. But from the beginning, we tried to place everyone where they would be most impactful.

Most of our larger shareholders ended up becoming line docs within the company, helping us do whatever it took. They might not hold fancy titles, but they go through the fire for us, and sometimes that just means holding the line at one of our sites. Building a team of all-in players is the secret sauce of CityMD.

Chris: As CityMD has scaled to over 550 providers, how do you maintain particular company culture as a health services provider?

Rich: Physicians went into the practice of medicine to help others. Particularly those of us who went into primary care and/or emergency medicine. We need to constantly remind ourselves of our responsibility to ‘Serve Kindness’, and rekindle the compassion and dedication that brought us into our field in the first place.

So often these intentions are choked out by bureaucracy and paperwork. We help physicians regain their identity. We do this by talking about our mission to serve kindness incessantly. And also to decrease the frustrations of our practice by supporting them with scribes and

Aftercare.

Again, Aftercare is our care coordination team manned by physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and other trained professionals to care for our patients after they leave our office.

Aftercare supports our site physicians by providing a safety net to perform anything and everything 7 days a week in real-time support. These include reviewing labs, fielding patient concerns/complaints, coordinating advanced imaging, and coordinating referral follow-ups to specialists.

We remind physicians of their identity and calling, and then we equip them to do so.

Chris: Any particular resources that informed your entrepreneurial journey, or that you use to keep up on the trends in the market and industry?

Rich: I’m a voracious reader, and I compound that by meeting a lot of people. I’ve spoken with many entrepreneurs and executives, some of whom have retired but are still open to hopping on a phone call.

The key is to meet people who work in healthcare. Keep open-minded and really keep your ears open. There is a lifetime of learning. Stay curious!