Frequently Asked Questions
Please review the frequently asked questions below. If you don’t find the answer to your question, feel free to contact our new patient coordinator via email, or set up a FREE discovery consultation.
Scheduling & Visits
What Are The Restrictions On Virtual Doctor's Visits?
Your intial visit at Intrinsic Wellness Clinic must be in person. After the first visit, all follow up visits can be conducted by phone or virtually using our secure video channel if you choose.
Email Etiquette
Patients have unlimited email contact with their Intrinsic Wellness Clinic provider team. However, if an email question or request is deemed by one of our staff to be too complicated or involved for a response via email they may, at their discretion, require that the member schedule a phone, telemedicine or in person visit instead of responding via email.
Scheduling & Cancellations
There is a 24-hour cancellation policy for all appointments with an Intrinsic Wellness Clinic doctor, health coach, or team member. Canceling within 24-hours will result in a $50 charge to the credit card on file. No-shows: If you do not show up to a phone, video/telemedicine or in person appointment without notifying the specific person you have an appointment with either via email or by changing the appointment using the online scheduling tool on the patient portal, you will be charged $100 to the card on file. Program Refunds: At the Intrinsic Wellness Clinic, we pride ourselves on bringing tremendous value to the lives of our patients. By enrolling in the ‘Bring Healthy Back’ Essentials Program, you are receiving a comprehensive program consisting of a multitude of services. Since these services work synergistically to bring our patients a result, working with patients through a program allows us to provide a better price than offering each service a-la-carte. If you choose to withdraw from the ‘Bring Healthy Back’ Essentials program at any point after the initial consultation, you will be billed for any services rendered at an hourly rate of $299, this includes the hours your clinician puts into your case outside of your one-on-one appointment time. If you choose to withdraw from our ‘Bring Healthy Back’ Essentials program after the initial consultation and before any other services have been rendered, you will receive a refund of the unused portion of your program. You will be required to return all materials that were provided to you at your initial appointment. All refunds will be subject to a 3% refund processing fee based on the amount that was paid. Refunds will be processed via the original payment method upon receipt of all materials. Cash payments will be refunded in the form of cheque. The ‘Bring Healthy Back’ Program binder is non-refundable ($99 dollar value).
Supplements
Why We Sell Nutritional Supplements and How We Price Them
We recommend nutritional supplements as an adjunct to dietary and lifestyle modification. This approach is central to the well-researched and science-based practice of functional medicine, which all of our professional staff have studied.
We sell therapeutic quality nutritional supplements as a service to our patients. With a few exceptions, we do not sell nutritional products of similar quality to those that are widely available over the counter. We purchase high-quality nutritional products from the top nutritional research laboratories and we price them to cover our costs of providing them. However, we keep our mark-ups as low as possible.
Billing & Insurance
We Are Not A Conventional Primary Care Physician
It is important to note the following however:
1. We do not fulfill an insurance company’s requirement for an in network primary care physician as we are not in-network with any insurance plan.
2. We are not available for same-day emergency appointments.
3. We do not have a 24-hour answering service and do not take calls on weekends. If you need to be seen urgently or have a medical emergency you would need to visit an ER or urgent care center.
We Do Not Bill Insurance Companies
We have prepared this section to answer questions you or your family members may have about the rationale for our financial policies. If after reading this you still have questions, feel free to speak with our staff.
Some of our patients have asked us why we don’t bill insurance companies directly. While we fully understand the financial challenge this presents to some patients we have chosen not to bill insurance directly for the following reasons:
When clinics bill insurance companies directly, the doctors are required to become participating providers. The doctors must sign a contract that allows the insurance company to determine which services they will and will not provide, and how much they can charge for those services. In general, insurance companies are not focused on any preventative or wellness services. They are heavily invested in the conventional model of health care that too often relies on drugs and surgery. We are committed to the functional medicine model that addresses the underlying causes of your symptoms with specific nutritional and lifestyle recommendations.
A participating provider must agree to accept the fees the insurance company establishes, regardless of whether the fees are reasonable or applicable to that practice. In general, these established fees cover the actual cost of the briefest (and we believe the lowest quality) care. You may be aware but in todayʼs health care environment, the actual cost for doctors to provide services continues to rise, while the percentage of reasonable fees that insurance payments cover is declining.
Ironically, some of our patients complain about their extremely brief office visits in other medical practices, while at the same time expressing frustration that we do not accept insurance. Unfortunately, we have found that we cannot stay in the insurance networks and provide the time-intensive, well-researched, expert care you’ll find at Intrinsic Wellness Clinic.
Most doctors and clinics cope with the requirements of being participating providers by keeping their office visits very brief, so that they can see many patients within a given timeframe. When doctors and clinics become unprofitable, they turn another institution for support. Because most primary care medical clinics are not able to sustain themselves financially, they’ve had to merge with hospitals whose expensive high-tech surgical and diagnostic procedures are priced to keep the clinics afloat.
Non-Intrinsic Wellness Clinic medical expenses such as lab tests may be covered by a member’s health insurance plan per that plan’s rules. However, Intrinsic Wellness Clinic will not submit a medical claim to insurance on your behalf. Additionally, we cannot assist you with claim resolution for our services.We will provide you with a detailed billing summary that you may submit to your insurance for reimbursement. Keep in mind, there may be procedures or lab tests that are not covered, depending on your plan’s rules.
About Lab Tests
- The specific tests ordered will be personalized to you based on your initial evaluation with an Intrinsic Wellness Clinic doctor and may include blood, saliva, urine, stool testing or other functional medicine tests.
- Some lab tests we offer as part of our functional medicine testing program may not be covered by insurance and in these cases you will be charged a fee for a particular test by the lab or through Intrinsic Wellness Clinic
- In some instances, we have contracted directly with the lab companies to offer direct patient pricing.
- We will make every effort to make you fully aware of any additional lab fees that may be incurred and to give you the opportunity to choose which lab tests you feel comfortable paying for.
- You are under no obligation to purchase any specialty testing.
- Should any lab results indicate you may need further testing, we will provide you with the results, rationale and our recommendations. We may direct you to your primary care physician or a relevant specialist.
- At home test kits: If a lab test kit is mailed to you by Intrinsic Wellness Clinic, you will be charged the day the kit is mailed.
- If your particular insurance company only pays for blood work done at a particular lab facility like LabCorp, you must inform us of this in advance of having blood work done. Most insurance plans cover labs done by major national labs