Textbook of Urgent Care Management: Chapter 44, Integrative Medicine

By Marty Martin

The Textbook of Urgent Care Management is now offering individual chapters for sale. The full book, provides an expert business consulting guide to potential or existing urgent care clinic owners, managers & operators as well as investors. Learn how to more effectively run your immediate care or walk-in center as well as start incorporating urgent care services into your existing primary care practice. The chapters cover valuable information from industry experts on how to start, manage, and even sell your urgent care center.

Chapter 44 includes:

Integrating Complementary and Alternative Medicine Intro Your Urgent Care Center
- Business Plan
- Is There a Way to Differentiate Your Business From Others in the Same Industry?

Integrating Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Two Strategies
- Provision of Clinical Care: The Complementary and Alternative Medicine Connection
- Payment for Complementary and Alternative Medicine Services: The Cash Connection

From Strategic Decision to Strategic Implementation

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940288529

Book preview

CHAPTER 44

Integrative Medicine

Marty Martin

from

CHAPTER 44

Integrative Medicine

Marty Martin

INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE (IM), THE evolutionary movement of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), is growing in popularity in all types of health-care settings. This chapter is one of the first explorations—if not the first—of how CAM services might be integrated into the urgent care setting. The Affordable Care Act has served as a catalyst for a focus not only on wellness and preventive health but also on alternative delivery models like accountable care organizations. This chapter outlines the view that CAM and IM should have their own place within all urgent care centers, and it highlights 10 urgent care centers across the United States that have made CAM part of their business models. Allow these illustrations to serve as inspiration, a basis for a best practice, or simply a demonstration of today’s reality that CAM can be successfully incorporated into urgent care if we are willing to travel the more innovative route.

Before describing how such an integration can be undertaken, we must first define CAM. According to the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, CAM includes …those medical systems, professions, practices, interventions, modalities, therapies, applications, theories, or claims that are currently not part of the dominant or conventional medical system.¹

Specific CAM practices include natural products (most of which