Seattle-based health care startup Zócalo Health has named Sarah Lopez its chief medical officer.
Before joining Zócalo Health, Lopez was the patient safety officer at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and an emergency medicine doctor. Lopez's appointment to her new role, announced Wednesday, comes as Zócalo Health is looking to expand its services.
"I firmly believe in Zócalo Health's mission to radically transform the health care system in the U.S. with a very specific focus on the Latino community," Lopez said in a release. "I'm proud to join a team that incorporates our community's values and traditions to make healthcare a more personal experience."
Lopez spent more than five years at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, according to her LinkedIn page, before which she was an emergency medicine physician at Kaiser Permanente. She went to medical school at the University of California, Irvine, and did her residency at Los Angeles County and the University of Southern California. In a news release, Zócalo Health said Lopez will grow the company's care model and clinical team.
Zócalo Health, founded in 2021 by Amazon veterans Mariza Hardin and Erik Cardenas, provides virtual health care appointments in both English and Spanish. In addition to providing services like prescription renewals and Covid-19 care, Zócalo Health, which raised a $5 million seed round in September, matches patients with a community health worker to help them navigate the health care system.
As of last year, the company's services were live in California and Texas, but Zócalo Health was targeting early this year to launch in Washington. Hardin, the startup's head of strategy and operations, met Cardenas, the startup's CEO, while the two were working at Amazon and realized the impact they could make by creating a virtual health care experience for Latino patients.
“We had opportunity and resources to really drive innovation and think outside the box, but we really weren’t focused on our community, the Latino population,” Hardin previously told the Business Journal. “It was time for us to leave the comfort of a company like Amazon and start a company like Zócalo Health. If it wasn’t us doing it, it would probably be somebody else. We wanted it to be by Latinos, for Latinos.”
