Well, it has definitely been a minute since I’ve updated this blog. I’ve been winding down my shifts at the hospital and have been ramping up our availability at Satori Healing. My wife Tracy and I have been having a lot of conversations about Satori Healing and it’s overall mission. She will be joining me at Satori Healing in the fall.
As many of you probably already know, I’ve been a hospitalist physician in rural hospitals for a little over a decade. I’ve been at Los Alamos Medical Center for the last 5 years. I love our local community and hope to build a local medical practice that supports and works with the local needs.
I had originally envisioned this clinic solely as an infusion clinic with a focus on ketamine in its treatment of mood disorders. I plan to continue this passion, but with the addition of my wife Tracy, a beloved local primary care provider we are branching into primary care and we had to seriously ask ourselves, what does this do to our original vision?
In the hospital I frequently saw patients who had physical or mental difficulties that made it difficult for them to make traditional outpatient appointments. After some encouragement, in addition to primary care in the office, spear headed by Tracy, I’ll be adding home medical visits to our service line a couple days a week.
One of our primary beliefs is the need to stay slim and be able to pass on the lower operating costs to our patients. Medical care needs to be more affordable. A big way to be able to keep our staff’s focus on you, the patient and costs low is to start cutting out middle men. All operating businesses have to place a large focus on the entity who is paying them. When it comes to your personal medical care, your medical provider, in or out of the hospital, is walking a tight rope trying to provide the best care for you, the patient, with the imposed limitations of what an insurance company, including medicare, is currently willing to pay for. The insurance companies, including medicare, decide what the patient has to pay in terms of a monthly fee and deductibles and what the medical provider will be ‘reimbursed’ for a given service. I would challenge anyone to look up the median salary of their primary care physician and then compare that to the salaries of the C-suites of any given insurance company. Someone’s making a lot of money out of this relationship and it’s not your medical provider or you. Tracy and I have a different idea.
We are going to start a direct to consumer primary care service with an affordable monthly membership fee. Our three tier system starts at $39.00 a month. Included in this basic plan is access to low cost in house medications and labs. Our focus will remain solely on you, our patient. We believe that with our expanding partnerships and emerging new non-insurance Medical Cost Sharing cooperatives the delivery of low cost, high quality, personalized medical care can be done outside the overpriced formal medical insurance industry.
Continuing the focus on ketamine treatments in partnership with our local mental health providers remains my passion. Our clinic has applied and been accepted as a treatment center for Spravato. Kristin and I recently returned from the annual American Society for Ketamine Physicians, Psychotherapists, and Practitioners annual meeting where a focus was on Standards of Care and Ethics. It was great to connect with other Ketamine treatment providers, compare notes and listen to the evidence of the ongoing efficacy of Ketamine in a host of emotional and physical ailments.
After being encouraged by an old friend of mine from residency, Dr Joel Rosen who has opened Santa Fe Mobile MD in Santa Fe doing home visits, I’m going to start providing a similar service here in Los Alamos. We are still in the process of putting this together, but Mondays and Wednesdays we plan to offer home visit MD appointments. We’re waiting on the return of a few permits, equipment, etc before we can officially start taking appointments, but we’re close. The cost of a basic appointment will be $250.00. I plan to be able to do most things that can be done at an outpatient appointment in the privacy of your home. More on this in the near future.
These new services and Tracy joining me is going to necessitate a new space. More on this next month.
Thank you all again for your interest and continued patronage. Much more to come.
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