Medical Integration: The Art of Working Together

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Smart chiropractors educate themselves about additional benefits to help their patients, and medical integration should be on their list

Instead of adding separate services, with medical integration a number of health care providers with different licenses work as a team to help heal their patients. Often, this starts with a chiropractor working with a licensed MD at the same practice with their mutual goal being to better their patients utilizing natural and holistic techniques. When at all possible, they want to avoid prescribing drugs or recommending surgeries.

Other health care providers, such as physical therapists and nutritionists often can also work in a medically integrated practice.

The key to medical integration is collaboration. The team of health care workers has various skills and viewpoints—but they all work together on each patient who comes to the practice.

For example, if a patient comes in complaining of pain in a problematic knee, the team won’t just look at the knee. Instead, they will examine the patient’s entire body to see exactly what is causing the pain. While the patient may think that their painful knee is the problem, after examining the patient together, the team of health care professionals may determine that the knee is causing pain because the other knee has degenerated, and the patient has been favoring the now-painful knee. Or there may be a pelvic issue, again causing the patient to favor the knee in question. By fixing exactly what is causing the pain, they can work with the patient to make it go away.

With medical integration, the team asks themselves the same question with each patient: What is really the cause of the problem that we’re seeing? This collaboration keeps everyone on the same page with one important objective—to do whatever they can to alleviate the patient’s pain naturally and holistically and give them exercises or guidelines to follow so that they can prevent the pain from returning.

Professionals on a medical integration team work together to no only correctly diagnose each patient, but also to make sure that the issue is cured, when at all possible, and not just giving the patient temporary relief.

Details of Integrated Practices

With a clinic that practices integrated medicine, the rules that insurance companies use to determine if the health care providers can continue to see the patients are less restrictive. In fact, with integrated medicine, patients often can get exactly the care that they need, and the providers can get paid for it.

Because integrated medical practices offer a variety of services, there is less chance that a change in health insurance or in health care-related legislation will put them out of business. If this causes one service to no longer be reimbursed or allowed, the clinic has others to provide income while benefitting patients.

Since medical integration strives to avoid surgeries and medications, the providers can often be paid more through insurance. Why? Because insurance companies know that healing the patient without using more expensive procedures will save them money in the long run.

Finally, a medical integration clinic can make double or triple the profits of a chiropractor’s clinic. They are offering more billable services for each patient—so there’s no need to double or triple the number of patients in order to receive this much greater amount of income.

What Medical Integration Also Offers

When health care professionals collaborate in a medically integrated practice, they accomplish a number of benefits both for the patients and themselves. They are focused on wellness as opposed to disease-maintenance and on restoring function rather than simply alleviating pain.

As a result, they don’t prescribe opioids immediately, as other medical professionals due, but rather, they determine how to heal the body so that the pain dissipates. With the opioid epidemic that has ravaged the country, this wellness care model eliminates further addictions from occurring.

Although professionals will make more money through medical integration, that’s not the point of it. The grander objective is to make patients not only pain-free, but feeling the best that they possibly can.