Working with Integrative Health Care Providers

Practicing medicine has become a struggle for many doctors, especially for those who want holistic/integrative practices. To make integrative medicine work, we need new business models that support the time-intensive, relationship-centered aspects of this approach. The re-emergence of fee-for-service models in which patients pay doctors directly, without the interference of third-party payers, and new developments like “concierge care” models in which patients pay yearly fees to be members of a physician’s prevention-oriented practice are steps in this direction, although the concierge approach has raised some ethical red flags in some medical circles.

There is also a resurgence of old-fashioned house-call medicine, along with new trends including corporate wellness programs, medical spas and wellness-oriented retirement homes, all of which provide new opportunities for holistically minded physicians.

Leading companies in the practitioner nutraceutical channel and the functional diagnostic testing field are responding to the needs for integrative care with comprehensive turn-key programs designed to make it easier for physicians to incorporate nutrition-based medicine into their practices.

All of these trends bode well for the future of integrative care, but we still have a long way to go. In the near term, primary care physicians need all the help they can get. It is clear from the growth of the natural products industry that consumers want and need holistic, integrative health care. The medical community is striving to meet those needs and to clear some of the political and economic roadblocks standing in the way.

Grace L. Keenan, M.D., received her medical degree from Memorial University School of Medicine, St. John’s, Newfoundland. She has been in private practice since 1988, founding Nova Medical Group. Dr. Keenan is a member of the American Professional Practice Association, Medical Society of Virginia, American College of Physicians, American Medical Association and MGMA. She is a clinical assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Medicine and an affiliate faculty at George Mason University.

Dr. Keenan is chairing the inaugural conference, “Heal Thy Practice: Transforming Primary Care,” scheduled for Oct. 31 to Nov. 2 in Tucson, Ariz.; the conference will explore various business development and practice management strategies that support prevention-oriented integrative health care. More information is available online at HolisticPrimaryCare.net.

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