Dr Paz Message

We have some exciting new changes to tell you about at the
Wellness Center.

We have implemented online scheduling as well as online
prescription refills to try and make it as easy as possible for you to
handle your day-to-day business with our office.

As patients learn to use these online services, this should free up
our phone lines so that we can give you faster service for things
that need urgent attention.

To sign up, just click on the PATIENT PORTAL button at the top of
our home page.

What I'm most excited about is our ability to conduct virtual office
visits. This will allow the caregivers at the Wellness Center to
interact with you in a very detailed way, saving you time and
money. For patients who are interested, this will allow you to have
several visits per year online and avoid the higher costs of
face-to-face office visits. We expect virtual office visits to be
available sometime this summer.

This is how it would work. Let's say you have a chronic medical
condition such as diabetes, hypertension or high cholesterol. We
may be able to see you once a year at the office for a complete
physical and 2 to 3 times per year we could simply conduct online
virtual office visits. At these virtual visits, we will be able to collect all
of the same information we could if you came into the office. You'll
be able to send us copies of your blood pressures and blood sugars
as well as any other information you'd like to include. We'll be able
to share laboratory tests and other educational materials. While this
might not be ideal for all patients, it could save a significant amount
of time and allow you to conduct your office visit at your
convenience in the calmer environment of your home. By doing this,
you would have time to put all your thoughts in writing rather than
feeling rushed by the usual time constraints of a regular doctor's
office visit. Hopefully this would make the office visit much more
worthwhile.

We will also be offering acute-care virtual office visits for minor
medical complaints that need our advice, but may be handled over
the Internet.

In addition time savings, we feel that this can offer a significant
financial savings at a time when many of our patients are out of
work or have lost their health insurance.
If you've lost your medical insurance, this can offer substantial
savings over routine office visits.

Along those same lines we have put together a significantly reduced
fee schedule for any patient who no longer has health insurance.
This will include significantly reduced fees for office visits, physicals
and any testing that we can do in the office such as EKGs,
pulmonary function tests and urinalysis.

We are very aware of the struggles that our patients are having
financially and we want to help. We hope that this will allow our
patient population to continue to receive extremely high-quality
healthcare at a cost that they can afford.

We'll be posting the reduced charges for patients with no insurance
on our website very soon. A list of these services is already
available at the Wellness Center.

I hope you're as excited as we are about the new services were
about to offer.

We look forward to seeing you soon either in person or through the
Internet

Yours in health,

Dr Paz