Jon StojanWellness is a multidimensional state, requiring a balance across multiple aspects of a person’s life, such as physical, mental, emotional, and more. Another important aspect of wellness is preventative care, where people don’t wait until they get sick to see a health provider and instead take action proactively to maintain and optimize their health.
The concierge medicine model operates on these concepts, where a doctor is on a retainer agreement with a client, allowing them to get to know the client better, take proactive measures, and refer the client to the appropriate specialists or services. This is especially helpful in large cities, where it’s hard for people to find a doctor who is the best fit for them.
Seeing the importance of optimizing wellness versus merely treating symptoms, The Integrated Clinic, a California-based clinic that provides interdisciplinary services to foster health, wellness, education, and performance, is launching a concierge service. This service allows The Integrated Clinic to provide a higher level of coordinated interdisciplinary care for clients, ensuring that their whole-health needs are met. This service also helps clients navigate the complicated healthcare system, helping them get the right referrals and access to the right doctors.
The Integrated Clinic was founded by Dr. Lev Gottlieb and Dr. Taylor Kuhn, two neuropsychologists and faculty researchers at UCLA. Prior to becoming business partners, they started out as neighbors and friends. Their practices are also complementary, as Dr. Gottlieb’s practice centers on children and adolescents while Dr. Kuhn specializes in younger and older adults. This allows them to see clients over their entire lifespan, as well as serve entire families. They have gained a reputation as “mind mechanics”, being expert diagnosticians for neurodiversity such as giftedness, dyslexia, autism, ADHD, as well as, conditions such as traumatic brain injuries and dementia.
Over the years, The Integrated Clinic has grown its practice, bringing on board various specialist clinicians and researchers. The clinic has expanded from Los Angeles into Santa Barbara and San Francisco, while also providing telehealth consultations. Aside from neuropsychology, cognitive rehabilitation, psychotherapy, and psychiatry, the clinic has extended its services to include biofeedback, sleep & behavioral medicine, educational/occupational, and child & family therapy.
According to Dr. Gottlieb, creating a concierge service allows The Integrated Clinic to leverage the 500 to 800 data points they collect about a client’s brain and mindstyle. Furthermore, with Los Angeles being the second-largest city in the US, it is challenging for clients to find and access the best mental health and medical professionals. “It’s hard for the average person to see the doctor they want,” Dr. Gottlieb says. “The Integrated Clinic gives our clients access to a wide range of professionals to help keep them healthy, providing all the cognitive, psychiatric, and functional services they would need.” He adds that The Integrated Clinic does not exclusively refer clients to its in-house providers. For every in-house referral, the clinic makes several external ones, empowering clients to make the best informed choices about their health.
Bringing the Team Approach to Private Practice
According to Dr. Kuhn, patients who go to an academic medical center or hospital are served by an entire medical team. For example, a patient diagnosed with dementia will have their medical team hold a case conference involving their psychiatrist, neurologist, neuropsychologist, radiologist, and other medical professionals. However, in private practice, that’s rarely the case, with individual providers often being very isolated and independent. With its concierge model, The Integrated Clinic is able to provide a high level of coordination among medical service providers, ensuring all of the client’s needs are met.
“We all know that the US health insurance system is incredibly complicated, and even paying out-of-pocket doesn’t guarantee that you are getting access to the best doctors for you,” Dr. Kuhn says. “Our concierge offering helps people navigate this space. We realized that most people, regardless of their wealth, don’t know what doctor to go to, don’t know what doctor to trust, and don’t know how to get access to them. At The Integrated Clinic, we use our mind mechanic skills to determine what is ailing a client and refer them to the doctor who can best address that specific issue.”
The Integrated Clinic also provides a wraparound service, where clients receive care and advice from multiple professionals across different health areas. Each week or month, a client may spend one hour with a nutritionist learning how to eat better for a more healthy lifestyle, one hour with a psychologist and sleep medicine expert to screen and remedy sleep problems, and an hour with an occupational therapist, providing some problem solving around organizing their day-to-day life better.
“Aside from expanding to other states, our long-term goal is to help families,” Dr. Gottlieb adds. “We’re particularly well-positioned to do that, from children to parents and grandparents. For most conditions, the best treatments involve the whole family. We have the ability to step in and help not just one person, but the entire family unit, including anyone who needs support. For example, caregiver burden is a real thing. A parent raising a child with autism or an adult child caring for a parent who’s dying or dealing with a chronic illness absolutely needs support.”