Medical appointments are office visits you schedule with our clinicians.
Primary Care appointments are focused, problem-oriented visits. They include physicals, infections, medication refills, acute illness, dermatology, chronic disease management, minor injuries, and paperwork. Clinical evaluation will be conducted by our clinician during the appointment, and determine the recommended diagnostic tests. The clinician will assess and treat, prescribing recommended prescription or OTC. Referral to outside treatment such as Physical Therapy or other specialists.
Core Integrative appointments include some foundational integrative medicine during clinical evaluation. The clinicians, in addition to the typical primary care labs, might order some basic integrative labs. The clinician will come up with personalized care plan based on integrative medicine principles, core supplements.
The goal of examining a wider, more complex set of data and personalizing a treatment plan for our patients is an ongoing challenge for our office. Most other holistic / integrative professionals (including physicians and other licensed non-physician practitioners) exclude insurance and work through a simplified cash-payment for their service. That’s due to the reality that the extensive tools and resources spent to assess and treat their patients are beyond the scope of what the insurance would consider a standard of care for primary care medical visits.
We ask patients to cooperate with us as we work with certain constraints in order to keep making our appointments accessible through insurance. The complexity and detail of this type of personalized care requires more clinical expertise and time, as well as staff support. For example, if there are a lot of labs, patients using insurance will be asked to split into separate visits, so that clinicians can assess and review, and give proper attention to results. Certain types of prescription need to be regularly monitored, and up-to-date lab tests and/or clinical review are needed, according to both regulations we have to comply with, and the clinicians’ own best-practice standards.
Specialty Consultations
Integrative Medicine and Functional Medicine are fundamentally more involved in terms of their comprehensive and holistic approach. To investigate the underlying root causes of your illness often relies on gleaning insight from larger panel of lab tests and diagnostic process. This detective work is complex and on-going, often resulting in extra resources spent by the medical office, not just during your medical visits, but before and afterwards.
Integrative and functional medicine services are not a covered benefit by insurance, our office has been willing to work with the insurance. We also offer cash rate for patients who do not have PPO insurance we are contracted with.
In order to continue providing this unique service that patients have come to deeply appreciate in their current appointments with Dr. Lai, our office is currently transitioning to provide more advanced functional medicine through a supplemental membership model.
The supplemental package offers the necessary infrastructure for more patient support and services that need to be present in order for us to take care of our patients holistically. It fairly addresses the burden from the extra workload that are not covered by insurance reimbursement and patients’ copay. Up to now, our office has largely subsidized the increased overhead and complexity, and it is not sustainable.
Much of the added work is unseen to the public because it’s not captured during the medical visits, but absorbed by our team. For example:
Some examples of specialty labs
