Dear Patient,
We hope that you’ve had a great start to the new year! Your confidence and trust in our team here at LA Integrative are most appreciated and do not go unnoticed.
We are writing to share important changes to our practice and business model. This is particularly useful if you plan to maintain continuity of care through LA Integrative Gastroenterology. If you anticipate using our services, I encourage you to spend a few minutes reviewing our updated patient care model.
Administrative Burden:
While we proudly utilize state-of-the-art technologies, like Athena, to manage our point-of-care, running a complex medical practice comes with heavy administrative expenses.
Our high operational practice incurs an excess of costs to ensure that staff, physicians, and our services are readily accessible to you. We know how hard it is to find thoughtful, quality patient care and go to great lengths to extend continuity of care and patient engagement across the board.
These values have been vital to our practice since its conception; therefore, we must continue to operate at the highest efficiency for our patients.
As a patient advocate, I try very hard to be attentive and respectful to every inquiry we receive and aim to reply as quickly as possible.
Last year, I personally managed over 15,000 messages, including portal inquiries, faxes, emails, unscheduled phone calls—in addition to scheduled phone calls and medical emergencies.
This workload, combined with over 1,000 requests for prescription refills, prior authorizations, and pharmacy communications, compounded.
Handling these inquiries pushed my schedule well into after-hours and incredibly early mornings, as well as weekends. As you can imagine, a simple 9-5 schedule would not be sufficient in managing the level of aftercare our patients need and deserve.
At age 68, I feel blessed to be in an excellent state of health and to be able to maintain this intensive workload. However, working outside of office visitations has become its own full-time job. In order to sustain the practice that I care so much about at the highest level of quality, I have put together a Membership Program detailed below:
Separating Consultation Service from Support Service:
The cost of the visit does not cover the need for ongoing support and the resources needed to sustain such support. Experience shows that support at many levels, professional and administrative, is necessary for all patients after their visit. To maintain the status of the service we have provided, we are now offering enrollment in our Membership Program.
Implementation of the membership program will begin with our new patients entering the practice. However, we will give priority to our established patients. We invite all those interested to request enrollment as soon as possible before available spots run out. After we reach our threshold, we will establish a waiting list.
Membership spots will be limited and considered case-by-case and on a first-come basis.
Although in the past we hadn’t fully implemented this policy, we will be moving forward in an effort to provide the highest level of quality service and care.
Membership Program Enrollment:
Understanding a Treating Physician vs. a Consulting Physician
As a Treating Physician, Dr. Rahbar will provide medical evaluations, order diagnostics (lab & imaging, etc.), prescribe medications, assist with referrals, recommend supplements, and be involved in ongoing medical support and continuity of care.
As a Consulting Physician, Dr. Rahbar will only conduct medical evaluations and provide recommendations that you can implement through the care and supervision of another treating doctor.
To visit Dr. Rahbar as a Consulting Physician, you do not need to pay for a membership plan.
Patients may request additional follow-up consultations or request enrollment in our membership program.
We offer our membership program as 6-month or 12-month packages, the latter being the most patient cost-effective. For more information, please visit our website.
Our Website is Now Updated:
For full patient transparency, we update our website from time to time with any new information regarding our business model, our integrative medicine philosophy, our fees, and service policies.
The Must Read section will provide further detail about the changes to our practice.
Thank you for reviewing our updated business model.
If you have any questions or feedback, we would love to hear from you as we begin our transition.
Thank you!
