You Asked, We Listened

October/November 2015

At Healthy Living Dallas, we love to hear your feedback. Several common themes we’ve been hearing from patients have led us to work diligently for the last three months to give our practice flow and systems a make-over. We hope you’ll keep your suggestions coming! If you have comments or suggestions of how we can improve, please give us feedback on our new Patient Resources Tab of our website, under the Make A Suggestion toolbar.

Most Common Feedback & How We’re Responding:

• It is difficult to reach you by phone / My voicemails aren’t returned in a timely manner.
• I sit in the waiting room too long.
• It’s hard to get follow-ups scheduled / Availability of follow-up appointments isn’t fast enough.
• I don’t know about all of the resources I have as a patient of Healthy Living.
• Why doesn’t my insurance cover more of your services?

First of all, let me take a moment to say thank you for being patient with us. Many of these solutions have taken months of research and changes in the back office before you get to see the changes in action. So here’s what we’ve been up to for the last three months:

First, we now have a dedicated phone line for Healthy Living! We’re so excited about this and hope that response time of return phone calls will be much shorter now. When you need to reach us to schedule, cancel/reschedule, speak to our dietitian, get prescriptions refilled or have supplement questions, please call our new phone number, (214) 736-7405. We’ll do our very best to return your call same day if possible or by the end of the next business day.

To increase schedule availability and help reduce your time in the waiting room we now have dedicated office hours specifically for Healthy Living Dallas. We’ll still be located in our ReproMed offices for now, but with designated office hours for Healthy Living you should see dramatic reductions in waiting room times. We want to be respectful of your time. Please understand with the nature of functional medicine there still may be days where you do wait to see the physician but we hope these times are shorter and we trust that you know you’ll receive the same level of personal service when it’s your appointment time.

New Office Hours:

Dallas Location:  Tuesday- 4:00 – 7:00 p.m. – NEW EVENING HOURS!
                           Wednesday- 8:00 – 10:00 a.m.
                            Occasional appointment times will be available on Monday and Friday mornings but will be strictly limited.

Grapevine Location: Thursday- 1:30 – 5:00 p.m.

It is our hope that this new scheduling will help improve waiting room times and improve the   speed that new patient and follow-up appointments can be scheduled.

Did you know that Healthy Living Dallas has loads of resources to help you reach your goals with less burden on you? It’s true! Many of our patients weren’t aware of everything we’ve worked hard to create to make your life easier.

Our goal at Healthy Living Dallas is to give you the best service that we can with as little out of pocket cost for you as possible, which is why we’ve chosen to bill insurance for our services. Right now two primary services that we offer aren’t covered by insurance at this point including BIA tests (bioelectrical impedance analysis- this helps us analyze your current fat/muscle/water ratio and lets us know objectively how your body is changing in response to our recommendations) and meal planning appointments. Both of these are fundamental and critical to our treatment at Healthy Living Dallas. Many of you who have seen us in the last two months have heard that BIAs are not being covered at this time and were told that this test is now a cash pay service. We’ve absorbed the cost of these tests for more than a year and a half with hopes of insurance coverage. Please be aware that effective November 1, 2015 these will now be a $20 charge to you, due at the time of service. Meal planning appointments will now be $100 with a guaranteed 60-90 minute one-on-one appointment with our dietitian or nutrition expert.

On a brighter note, we’ve added a new staff member to Healthy Living Dallas for two primary reasons. First, Stephanie Olivares, our clinical nutritionist for the last year and a half, is moving out of patient care, into the role of clinical director of Healthy Living Dallas. This is a blessing for Stephanie as the different schedule will allow her to begin trying to start a family and will also be beneficial for all of our patients as her new role will allow us to get more information/resources to you in a more timely manner. To aid in patient care, and to help improve insurance reimbursement, we’re thrilled to announce the newest member of our staff, Stacey Chmiel, a registered dietitian. With Stacey’s credentials and state licensure, we expect that come Summer of 2016 that more and more of our services will be covered by an increased number of insurance plans. We absolutely love Stacey’s knowledge and passion for nutrition. We think she’s a perfect fit for our office and can’t wait for you to meet her.

There’s more changes on the way! Keep your eyes open for our December and January newsletters when we’ll share more about our most exciting changes yet at Healthy Living Dallas!