This news largely flew under the radar. It shouldn’t have. Weeks’ steadfast publication of The Integrator Blog has been enormously helpful to the integrative health and medicine field for many years. Several years ago when I was planning the launch of FON, and ‘going to school’ on the emerging field of integrative health and medicine, I discovered the work of John Weeks and The Integrator. At the time, no outlet
My recent posts on why integrative and functional medicine practices often fail, and how to go about mastering a ‘sales funnel’ to build patient volume, elicited a lot of positive feedback—as much as any articles I’ve written over the last few years. Could this be because more folks within the integrative health community are recognizing that integrative clinical prowess that is not equally matched to persistent business acumen does not
Yes, I know, the very notion of you, a clinician, reading about a ‘sales funnel’ in connection to the delivery of medicine makes you cringe. But I’m a marketing and business development guy who focuses on these things, and I’m convinced these seven steps will help your practice thrive. I think we can readily agree that any enterprise, including integrative, functional, and concierge medicine practices, requires a steady flow of
In 2012 the most experienced researcher of the costs and benefits of complementary and integrative care stated: “I’m tired of this talk that there is no evidence for cost-effectiveness of complementary and integrative medicine. There is evidence. We need to move onto phase two and look at how transferable these findings are. We can take this evidence and run.” This was Dr. Patricia Herman, ND, PhD of the Rand Corporation
As a 24-year cancer survivor I watched Cancer: Emperor of all Maladies with mixed emotions. From this patient’s perspective, the film is all about the ‘tumor’ and treats the host, aka the patient, as almost an irrelevant, disconnected entity. Ken Burns is the preeminent documentarian of our time. His own mother succumbed to metastatic breast cancer when he was only 11. His latest work, Cancer, produced by Barak Goodman and
Many integrative practitioners and online enterprises want to know whether Stark, anti-kickback, and fee-splitting laws are violated by business arrangements that offer online coupons or web-based coupons to customers. Let’s break this question down a bit for analysis. First, Stark self-referral law is on the federal level. We are only interested in federal law if Medicare Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California) or another federally funded health care reimbursement program is involved.
A colleague recently asked for an example of an economically sustainable academic medical center fully ‘integrated’ across specialties and service lines. Regrettably, after thinking long and hard, I couldn’t come up with even one fitting that description. However, there do appear to be a few seemingly profitable outlier programs featuring direct-pay models for consults and super bills requiring patients to file their own insurance claims. The only academic or hospital-based
Have you ever thought about starting a direct-pay medical practice or other variation of a private medical practice? Well, whether you are concerned about the Affordable Care Act, looming Medicare cuts or a board certified physician curious about what the next few years in your practice will look like, there are a few things to consider before investing the time, money and energy to bring your direct-pay or concierge medical
The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), along with the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just released results from its 2012 National Health Interview Survey on the usage of complementary and integrative products and modalities among adults and children. Some interesting findings include: • 2012 overall usage is about the same, once
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The Rise of Integrative Health & Medicine
By Glenn Sabin and Taylor Walsh
We will also send you the best of our blog—The Business of Integrative Health & Medicine.