Baylor Scott & White Health is adding dozens of Texas urgent care clinics to its network thanks to a newly announced deal with NextCare Urgent Care.
Forty-one facilities in “fast-growing areas” such as Houston, San Antonio and Abilene will give the state’s largest nonprofit health system a foothold in new markets. The deal also catapults Baylor Scott & White to a new role as one of Texas’ major providers of urgent care services.
“We are dedicated to providing customers with as much choice as possible when seeking care," Pete McCanna, CEO of Baylor Scott & White, said in a Thursday release from the system. "Through this venture, the NextCare sites across the state will be integrated into our ecosystem of offerings, which already includes 24/7 virtual care available to all Texans via MyBSWHealth.com.”
Baylor Scott & White and NextCare said they will be hammering out branding, digital integrations and “other enhancements to better serve customers” over the next several months.
The former is a major player in the Texas healthcare market with 51 hospitals—including flagship academic medical centers in Dallas, Fort Worth and Temple—and a total of over 1,200 locations through which 3 million-plus people access care. The new urgent care deal would bolster its position as a high-access integrated delivery network, which, along with digital access points, is supported by its health plan.
NextCare, meanwhile, operates more than 170 urgent and primary care clinics in 12 states. It also offers video- and text-based virtual care services alongside digital scheduling.
Forty-one has proven to be the magic number when it comes to Texas urgent care deals, as back in May, for-profit giant HCA Healthcare inked an agreement to acquire the same number of facilities from clinic operator FastMed.
Those locations were spread across the Dallas, Austin, El Paso, San Antonio and Houston areas, the latter two of which would overlap with the markets Baylor Scott & White is now entering. That deal, terms of which were not disclosed, was slated to close sometime this summer.