2015 Heal Thy Practice: Transforming Patient Care Conference

Heal Thy Practice, produced by Holistic Primary Care, is the nation’s leading conference on practice transformation & the implementation of integrative care. The 2015 program, held on Coronado Island in San Diego, CA, provided equal measures of clinical skill-building, nuts & bolts practice development, and inspiration from some of the pioneers and key opinion leaders in holistic/integrative medicine.

Whether you’re contemplating a major practice change or simply looking for practical advice for improving the fiscal health of your practice and the physical health of your patients, you’ll find a wealth of valuable guidance from Heal Thy Practice 2015. Our renowned faculty offers you their real world, field-tested experience and practical steps for creating and maintaining a healthy and health-focused integrative practice.

Learning Objectives

By viewing/auditing these lectures, participants will learn to:

• Enhance clinical skills through evidence-based approaches to diagnosing and managing systemic inflammation, food sensitivities, common gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, and neurocognitive conditions.
• Improve the care of “difficult” patients with complex chronic disorders conditions.
• Implement integrative & functional medicine within conventional insurancebased practice settings.
• Understand strengths and drawbacks of various practice models for prevention-oriented medicine.
• Utilize concepts from systems biology to improve clinical outcomes.
• Optimize the use of healthcare information technology and ancillary health services within their practices.
• Acquire a firm grasp of the medicolegal aspects of holistic/integrative practice.
• Integrate the emerging sciences of genomics and microbiomics into daily clinical practice.
• Market & manage their practices in a way that is in synch with their highest values and ethics.
• Renew enthusiasm for clinical practice.

In an era when many clinicians are convinced private practice is a relic of the past, and corporate control is inevitable, Dr. Erik Lundquist's Temecula Center for Integrative Medicine is a shining example of what can happen when a practitioner responds to what his or her community really needs. TCIM is a small private clinic providing high-quality functional medicine in a fully insurance-based model. It was overbooked just 3 months after opening. Heal Thy Practice alumnus, Dr. Lundquist shares valuable lessons learned on his journey from a Marine field hospital in Afghanistan to opening his own clinic in Temecula. He provides insight on cultivating teamwork, careful coding, creating positive patient experiences, and communicating with the community.

American companies spent nearly $20 billion on employee wellness programs last year, and they are desperately seeking what holistic/functional medicine practitioners have to offer.  Dr. Pedram Shojai,  an accomplished practitioner of Chinese medicine, is also a key player in the corporate wellness field. He works extensively with corporations large and small to improve the health status of their employees. Dr. Shojai outlines the opportunities now emerging in corporate wellness, and share strategies for breaking into this fast-moving field.

Many people believe that integrative medicine is only possible in a direct-pay or concierge practice model. Not so, says Heal Thy Practice alumnus, Dr. Erik Lundquist. He and his colleagues at Temecula Center for Integrative Medicine are providing high-quality functional medicine in a fully insurance-based model. He and his business partner, Niki Fox, explain how to code for functional medicine services, how they use “incident-to” billing, and their reasons for choosing an insurance model instead of direct pay.

In this lively session, Heal Thy Practice alumni Drs. Erik Lundquist and Mark Menolascino, along with Niki Fox and Pedram Shojai share insight and answer key questions on billing and coding, incident-to strategies, staffing issues, emerging opportunities in holistic medicine, pros and cons of various practice models, and more. Facilitated by Holistic Primary Care’s editor, Erik Goldman.

Conventional medicine has limited tools for dealing with chronic, systemic inflammation. From his unique perspective as the first naturopathic physician to complete a residency and fellowship in cardiology, and the first to work in a conventional cardiac hospital, Dr. Decker Weiss will share holistic strategies for down-regulating inflammatory pathways.

From ADHD and autism spectrum disorders in childhood to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s in advanced age, neurological and cognitive disorders are increasingly common problems.  As was the case with cardiovascular disease 20 years ago, the medical community is slowly starting to realize the degree to which chronic systemic inflammation plays a role in all of these disorders. This opens vast new treatment and prevention possibilities. Dr. Mark Menolascino shares both scientific data and clinical pearls for better management of inflammation leading to cognitive problems.

Discoveries about the human microbiome are reshaping many aspects of medicine and opening new avenues for treatment not only of digestive disorders but also depression, sleep problems, and autoimmune conditions. Dr. Jill Carnahan offers practical tips for incorporating microbiome testing, probiotic treatments, and gut-healing protocols into routine practice.

Practitioners who understand how to leverage insights obtained from systems biology can vastly improve their clinical outcomes in managing patients with complex chronic disorders.  Jim LaValle, RPh,  describes a simple yet highly flexible analytic system he developed with Dr. Andrew Heyman at George Washington University, that helps clinicians read through the metabolic noise and put biomarkers into meaningful perspective for themselves and their patients.

Drawing from her own experience in creating the highly successful Flatiron Functional Medicine clinic near Boulder, CO, Dr. Jill Carnahan offers practical tips and valuable lessons for the establishment of a direct-pay clinical practice. She shares insight on pricing services, bookkeeping, marketing with integrity, financing the transition, creating referral streams, and overcoming personal fears of change.

There are literally thousands of ancillary services now being marketed to physicians and other practitioners. The right ones can bring major improvements both to patient care and to the fiscal health of a practice. The wrong ones can be a big drain. Heal Thy Practice program chairman, Dr. Mark Menolascino draws on his own personal experience to share insight on how to select ancillaries that will really make a difference to you and your patients.

All-too-often, computer technology has been an intrusion on the practitioner-patient relationship, disrupting and distracting rather than facilitating communication. It need not be this way, and a new wave of mobile tech—much of it developed by patients themselves—can heal these broken lines of communication Mette Dyhrberg, co-founder of the Mymee self-tracking app, is among a new generation of  “patient-preneurs” who’ve translated their own health challenges into useful tools. She shares insight on how to make tech healthier, friendlier and more helpful to both practitioners and patients.

Clinicians are scrambling to catch up with the genomics revolution, as proactive patients seek gene tests from direct-to-consumer companies like 23andMe. Dr. Bridget Briggs, who heads a successful insurance-based functional medicine practice in Murrieta, CA, will describe how she uses genome data in the context of other clinical tests to guide her treatment decisions. She puts together the pieces of the MTHFR puzzle, and shares insight on how she bills for gene testing and interpretation, and how she’s been able to obtain buy-in from insurers.

Practice development consultant Miriam Zacharias returns to Heal Thy Practice with fresh insight on how to nurture and market integrative practices in ways that are in synch with the core values of healing. She offers practice-building strategies from her new book, The PEACE Process, and essential practice development tips gleaned from hundreds of participants in her recent Prosperous Practitioner Summit.

Jacques Simon, one of the nation's top attorneys focused on medicolegal issues in holistic medicine, returns to Heal Thy Practice with legal perspectives on informed consent, record-keeping in integrative medicine, billing for holistic services, dealing with state medical boards. Throughout this lively interactive session, Simon offers tips for avoiding legal and regulatory hassles and for keeping your practice on solid medicolegal ground.

One of the world's foremost experts on gluten sensitivity & other food allergies, returns to Heal Thy Practice with new perspectives on gluten and other common food allergens, their impact on neurophysiology, and the pros & cons of major dietary changes. You may think you know gluten, but until you’ve heard Dr. O’Bryan you don’t know the half of it!

Psychoneurologist Sylva Dvorak, PhD, has devoted years studying the pathways through which physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual signals are processed and integrated. With emphasis on movement and ritual as tools for transformation, she helps people restore health, overcome self-defeating behaviors, and make positive changes. In this special workshop, Dr. Dvorak guides Heal Thy Practice attendees in creating rituals that will help them move forward in their professional and personal lives.

Cardiovascular and mental health are intimately related. Physiologist Scott Minton, MS, PhD, reviews the emerging evidence of the role played by omega-3s EPA and DHA in modulating membrane receptors, channels, and associated signal transduction pathways to affect cardiovascular, cognitive and emotional functions. He also provides practical tools for determining clinically doses of omega-3s in different patient populations.  (Sponsored by Nordic Naturals)

Chronic fatigue is common: studies suggest that it comes up in more than 20% of all patient contacts. While no single cause of chronic fatigue has yet been identified, there are indications that nutritional deficiencies, environmental toxins, changes to the hypothalamic pituitary- adrenal axis, immune reactions to food, and GI dysfunctions all play a role.  Bridget Briggs, MD, describes the multifactorial etiology of chronic fatigue, explains how to measure and interpret the interrelationships of metabolic biomarkers associated with this complex condition, and shares practice pearls for improving outcomes with CFS patients. (Sponsored by Genova Diagnostics)