What is Direct Primary Care?
Direct primary care is an innovative model of primary care that gives providers alternatives to traditional fee-for-service insurance billing. Reducing the overhead for third-party insurance allows providers to lower fees and spend quality time with fewer patients – for the same cost.
Integrative or "Functional"
Medicine
What is integrative medicine?
Integrative medicine combines the most well-researched conventional medicine with the most well-researched, evidence-based complementary therapies to achieve the appropriate care for each person.
Integrative medicine uses an evidence-based approach focusing on you as a whole person and not just your illness or disease. While it seeks to understand the underlying cause of your symptoms or condition, it does so by looking at your complete mind, body and spirit. Integrative medicine uses an evidence-based approach to improve your health and wellness.
Integrative medicine believes your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs affect your health. It believes those needs rely on each other and affect your entire well-being. There are many different aspects to address, so integrative medicine uses a combination of therapies and lifestyle changes.
With integrative medicine, the relationships between you and your healthcare providers are important. You are equal partners in your healing process. Integrative medicine aims for well-coordinated care among different providers and specialists. It brings together conventional healthcare approaches (like medication and psychotherapy) and complementary therapies (like supplements and therapies). In this way, integrative medicine “integrates” all aspects of your well-being to achieve optimal health and healing.
Catastrophic Insurance
What is it, and why should I have it?
Catastrophic health insurance plans have low monthly premiums and very high deductibles. They may be an affordable way to protect yourself from worst-case scenarios, like getting seriously sick or injured. But you pay most routine medical expenses yourself. Patients under 30 qualify. Need another alternative? Try shared programs.
Shared Programs
Health cost sharing is a model of healthcare coverage in which a group of people pay a monthly sum (known as a “share”) to cover each other’s healthcare expenses.
It has traditionally been practiced among Christian groups wishing to follow the Bible’s teachings of sharing one another’s financial burdens.
For this reason, today’s medical cost sharing programs are also known as cost sharing “ministries”.
These ministries operate very similarly to health insurance, except instead of paying an insurance company to cover your bills, you’re paying into a pool that you and your fellow members can access as healthcare needs arise.
For example, let’s say your child develops a strange rash and needs to see a pediatrician.
In the insurance model, you’d typically see a doctor in-network, pay your deductible and the doctor’s office bills the remainder to your insurance company plus any extras that aren’t covered.
In a medical cost sharing program, you pick your pediatrician, pay the cash rate (which is typically much lower) and the bill is picked up or reimbursed by the medical cost sharing organization subject to the rules of the pool.