- April 17, 2025
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A new primary care center opened April 10 in a shopping center in Venice, one of six centers on the Gulf Coast that have launched since the beginning of the year through a partnership involving Florida Blue.
The insurance company has joined forces with Sanitas Medical Center and parent companies GuideWell Health and Keralty to create what Florida Blue Market President Phil Lee calls a “new model” for care.
“It takes partners … to be able to provide a new model in a transformative way that's high-quality, patient-centered [and] affordable,” Lee says at the ribbon-cutting for the newest clinic, which is located in a Publix-anchored shopping center off East Venice Avenue.
“Health care, despite our best efforts, [is] still highly unaffordable, highly inaccessible,” Lee says. “We're going to continue to work very, very hard as an organization to bring that forward, and today is a great, shining example of what that looks like.”
The new Florida Blue Sanitas Medical Center in Venice will be open to Florida Blue members, of which there are more than 5 million in Florida. In some cases, Lee says, Florida Blue members will have $0 copays at the center. The primary care clinic is also open to those who want to self-pay or who have Medicare, according to its website.
Sanitas and Florida Blue launched the first primary care centers together in 2014 in the Miami-Dade area. The partnership has grown to include more than 70 centers across the state, Lee says, including these six on the Gulf Coast that have opened since the beginning of 2025:
Parent companies GuideWell and Keralty have facilitated the Florida Blue Sanitas Medical Center brand’s expansion.
“We all know that this fragmented [health care] system needs improvement, and we're here to make that happen,” says Gina Mangus, senior director of ecosystem development at GuideWell, parent company of Florida Blue.
“At Guidwell Health, by serving as the connective tissue between the insurance side of our business and the care delivery side of our business," Mangus says, "we are building local ecosystems of care that are deeply integrated, that meet unique needs of people and communities, taking friction out of the system and really personalizing that care experience."
One way that care will be personalized is through time doctors spend with patients, according to Sanitas Medical Director Dr. Juan Zarza.
Zarza says he began working for Sanitas nine years ago and was able to see six patients a day, a luxury which he was not sure would last. His boss kept telling him: “‘Take good care of the patient,’” Zarza recalls, and the business would take care of itself. “Surely enough, our patient centers kept growing” and now have more than 500,000 members, he says.
“We care for the whole person,” Zarza says, from managing chronic conditions to “overall well-being.”
Services at Florida Blue Sanitas Medical Center include primary care, mental health services, lab tests, wellness programs and specialized care.
