Integrated health services

Integrative health is a health care model, which focuses on various healthcare providers working together, for the purpose of increasing communication, coordination, and to better leverage monies available for healthcare with the ultimate goal of offering better, more consistent, and more affordable care to patients.
PPACA
In 2011, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act established the guidelines for collaborative networks termed "Accountable Care Organizations". These ACOs were restricted to the Medicare/Medicaid Program and offered no benefit to private pay patients. The ACO model was characterised as focusing on pressuring, and incentivizing health care practitioners to decrease their costs and in turn decrease the government's reimbursement expenditures in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
History
On the heals of this ACO transformation, there was already movement in the private insurance sector by a collaborative group named Ascension Integrated Health Services. Formed by Dr. Eric Snowden, a Texas based chiropractor and noted author of "Success in the Out of Network Healthcare Model" , Ascension Integrated Health Services brought together various health care entities (laboratories, pharmacies, ambulatory surgical centers, clinical physicians, chiropractors, etc), and while staying independent, were able to leverage their relationship to increase the coordination of patient care through technology, access, and reimbursement.
Ascension Integrated Health Services employed teams of Health care reimbursement experts in order to offer a hedge of protection against the major commercial insurers who employed a strategy of denial, recoupment of alleged overpayments, and aggressive anti-fraud efforts even when not warranted. Ascension Integrated Health Services brought together the various independent entities under its umbrella to centralize knowledge and other resources. This enabled practitioners to offer services that otherwise would have been unaffordable for most patients, such as stem cell treatment, prolotherapy, as well as enabling solo providers to withstand the sometimes months and years of slowed payments from the insurance and private fund providers. In as much as Ascension established collaborations with in network and out of network providers, it added stability to the out of network heath care model which enabled patients to have more control of their own healthcare, while simultaneously reducing the cost to the patients and to the health funds for rendered care.
Growth of Integrative Health
As we generally witness, anything that greatly fulfills a need, is generally replicated. Ascension's efforts were no exception. Soon after Ascension Integrated Health Services began making waives, the phenomenon of Integrative Health swept the nation. Integrative Health groups spread across the nation in one form of the other. Today, integrative health have become a well accepted and the fastest growing subsector of the healthcare model.
Integrative health groups are known to integrative their computer systems in an effort to increase patient care. In an integrative health office, patient generally will see their primary physician or chiropractor and the file, with all patient health information secured, will be seen by multiple specialists so that patients will always receive the most thorough evaluations, which leads to better care. In integrated health urgent care centers, the patients present to the urgent care center and, as a consequence of integrated computer systems, the urgent care has immediate access to patient records as well as immediate contact with the patient's other providers. Every decision is made for the patient with full knowledge and full communications. The patient, in the integrated health model, no longer has to to to four practitioners, who each evaluate without full access to the previous practitioners' evaluations. By integrating these assessments, redundancy is reduced or eliminated, thereby saving the insurance companies and health care funds funds that would normally be spent on redundant testing and redundant examinations.
More and more we see the integrated approach being utilized in the corporate sector, in which large corporations establish relationships with integrated groups to provide employee wellness, ergonomic and other work related instructions, provide seminars on diabetes, stress, heart disease, and other common ailments that ultimately lead to lost work days and increases self funded health policies expenses.
Integrative health groups have insinuated themselves in virtually every aspect of social activity. Many integrative groups now offer programs and work alongside home owners associations, city recreation, public and private schools, and other venues that better position them to educate and more fully serve the people in their community.
USIHA
In 2014, the United States Integrative Healthcare Association was formed in order to ensure the standards of the integrative health community. By educating, creating standards of medical necessity, honesty, integrity, and competence, the USIHA trained healthcare practitioners to operate in a complementary integrated model. Concerned about abuses that he witnessed in the health care arena, Dr. Eric Snowden founded the USIHA in order to ensure competence by suppliers and practitioners of health care services, transparency, high clinical standards, true integration, and to ensure that collaborative efforts would continue to place patient care first.

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