A $2.5 million health clinic developed by the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine is expected to open in Tucson in 2016.
The Tucson clinic will be the second UA Integrative Health Center. The first opened in Phoenix in 2012 in affiliation with several entities, including the UA’s Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, which was founded by author and holistic health advocate Dr. Andrew Weil.
The UA Center has long had a consultative clinic, which currently has a three-month waiting list, but the new Tucson clinic will be a much larger scale endeavor with on-site treatment rather than solely consultations. And the new clinic will be far more accessible, said Kieran Richardson, director of operations at the UA Center for Integrative Medicine.
Patients will use the clinic for primary care, which will consist of both conventional and complementary health strategies, taking into account mind, spirit, community and lifestyle, in addition to the body. Patients will have a personal physician, a health coach, a nutritionist and can also choose to see an integrative chiropractic physician, an acupuncturist or a mind-body specialist. All of the practitioners will work together.
The Tucson clinic is expected to open with Banner Health as a partner, Richardson said. Banner recently acquired the Tucson-based UA Health Network. He expects the Tucson clinic will have between 1,200 and 1,800 patients — similar to the number of patients at the Phoenix clinic.
The Tucson-based David and Lura Lovell Foundation, which supports integrative medicine, announced Tuesday it is awarding $300,000 to the new clinic, and fundraising is ongoing.
Richardson stressed that the new clinic is still in its early stages of development and an exact opening date, as well as a location, have not yet been decided. It is not expected to be located on the UA campus but rather at a separate location in Tucson.
The Phoenix clinic, at 3033 N. Central Ave., opened in affiliation with District Medical Group, the UA College of Medicine-Tucson and the UA College of Medicine-Phoenix. It was designed by the UA Center for Integrative Medicine and is led by physicans and practitioners who trained at the UA Center.
The clinic operates on a membership model. While the primary health care patients receive is covered by insurance, other services are not. The membership model costs range from $500 to $1,250 per year.
At the Phoenix clinic, some employers are covering a significant portion of the membership fee, Richardson said. Those employers include Maricopa County and the Salt River Project.
Officials say they hope Pima County employers will be similarly supportive of the clinic.
“We believe this kind of care can reduce absenteeism and make people more efficient and ready to work,” Richardson said. “It could drive down the employer cost for health care. We are studying that in Phoenix and we are hoping that in the next 18 months to two years we will have that study completed and will be able to prove that.”
The Tucson clinic will operate on the same membership model and will also provide a setting to train medical students, residents and fellows, UA Center for Integrative Medicine spokeswoman Genevieve Gutiérrez Gil said.
“There are a lot of unique features to it. A lot of medical practices are sort of moving in this direction in that they charge a membership fee to get better access to physicians,” Richardson said. “Ours is about creating a full primary care model that takes care of your health-care needs not only from a physician’s perspective but with other complementary practitioners.”
According to a plan for the Tucson clinic, staff clinicians may include integrative physicians, an integrative nurse practitioner or integrative physician assistant, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, an integrative chiropractor, a mind-body practitioner, and integrative nutritionists and health coaches.
