Dear Healing Garden's Patients, 

As we begin our 21st year at the Healing Gardens, we are so grateful and honored to have been serving as both your primary care providers and your functional/integrative medicine specialists. For us to continue to practice and survive as a non-corporate practice as we have for more than 30 years, we are going to have to honor our truths and beliefs in how to best serve our patients in a holistic way. 

With this in mind, we are writing to inform you of a change in our insurance billing at the Healing Gardens. As of June 1, 2024, we will no longer be contracted with insurance companies other than Cigna. And thus, will no longer submit your bills to insurance. We will continue to work with Cigna for the time being, but will be exiting all insurance including Cigna by year end. We will keep you informed and absolutely give you 90 days notice prior to exiting Cigna. 

What this means for you: We are no longer contracted with insurance companies. However, you may still submit your superbills to your insurance on your own for reimbursement. The new process is that payment is due at time of service and we will provide you the documents to submit to your insurance company for reimbursement. 

This decision has come as a result of our desire to put your care and our desire to provide the best care for you ahead of a for-profit insurance company's paperwork and limiting contractual requirements of providers. Unfortunately, when we are contracted with them we are forced to treat you (OUR patients) according to their rules, rather than according to your true health needs or even how you want to be treated. As you know, our visits at the HGHC are much more thorough and our goal is to get to the root cause of your concerns, and not simply get you in and out quickly and hastily (as insurance companies expect). True care requires more time and education to solve the issues. Unfortunately, our personalized care model doesn't get compensated by insurance companies accurately because it is not within the 10 minute visits they think we should be providing. 

With this change, we are certainly not dismissing you as a patient and will still continue as your medical team. We can also order your lab work, procedures, and tests through an in-network provider and utilize a hybrid of care to best meet everyone's needs. 

We have researched and considered this change very carefully and ultimately found the additional burden is small compared to the freedom and significantly increased benefits that this change affords both of us. To help you navigate this change, we will work with you, explaining the superbill and what information your insurance company will be looking for. 

If you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to email us at billinghealinggardens@gmail.com. We appreciate you trusting us with your healthcare needs in the past and we look forward to continuing to help you for many years to come. 

Sincerely,

Jacqueline Fields, M.D and The Healing Gardens Health Center Team