Yes the clinic is exciting. My colleague and friend Hannah Olanoff has been getting this project together, and she has a contact email address:
info@cfsclinic.com . We expect to open in early Oct ober with some part time people, if it can hold its head up financially we'll get fulltime people in and rev it up.
Its a model clinic, we'll be using a neat electronic medical record designed just for CFS by experts (well an expert) and using the Miami site to train doctors, hopefully we will then open solid good clinics in other towns in the US. From this we will have the clinical trials network, the natural history study, and other important data that we desperately need from the research side, and of course the patients will have access to well trained doctors and a structure that allows other experts to weigh in on tricky cases.
Should the
first clinic actually make any money, it will fund a foundation to support the research and underwrite some of the folks who can't afford care. It may be pie in the sky, but I am really psyched!
It will be an out of network clinic, and we will be charging for the visits in cash , handing the patients the filled in forms they need to be reimbursed by their insurance. When ever possible procedures and labs will be billed to the insurance company to keep out of pocket cash payments as low as possible. Sad to say, we need cash to run the clinic since we are starting on a wing and a prayer, so please don't be too upset by the reimbursement plan. Once we are solvent, we will look at other methods.
