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ABOUT CAIPM
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Non-profit Organization
The California Institutes of Preventive Medicine is a non-profit medical corporation being founded in San Diego, California. The San Diego center will be the prototype for a statewide system designed to make affordable preventive medicine available to all Californians. Our goal is to improve the health of all California residents by making preventive medicine the platform upon which primary medical care is based. The essence of preventive medicine at the Institutes involves the coupling of a special type of comprehensive medical evaluation with appropriate risk abatement programs.
Typically, medical practice addresses patient health only in reaction to the symptoms of the moment not in relation to the overall context in which those symptoms occur. Our goal at the Institutes is to obtain a comprehensive medical understanding of each individual and to carefully explain it, with written documentation, to that person so that they may act as advocates for their own medical care. This may mean they enroll in a wide range of Institutes-offered risk abatement programs or that we direct them to services by their regular physician.
The Institutes' approach to preventive medicine has three broad components:
- a comprehensive biopsychosocial medical evaluation for diagnosis, risk identification, and risk stratification,
- a specialized report system to inform and educate each patient of our findings and the significance of those findings, and
- a series of risk abatement programs to help patients decrease their health risks.
The Institutes' approach is based on the concepts underlying the highly successful Department of Preventive Medicine that Dr. Felitti founded at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. This department has existed for 26 years and recently provided preventive medical services to its one-millionth patient. Delivery costs for those preventive services are far below costs of any other medical provider in the community. The department has won statewide and nationwide awards and research grants; it frequently attracts international visitors.
The associated Risk Abatement services of the department are recognized nationally as "cutting-edge." The department is known as being at the vanguard in treating obesity, the genetic disease Hemochromatosis, and the long-term consequences of childhood trauma. Indeed, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and NIH (National Institutes of Health) have granted nearly ten million dollars to the department for large-scale research in these areas.
As a delivery system for cost-effective preventive medicine, this department is unsurpassed in the world. Its systematized approach makes it a unique setting for medical research. Instead of little, symptom-based snapshots of patient health, the whole picture is documented either for an individual or for a population.
The effect of this detailed biopsychosocial evaluation, risk stratification and risk abatement has been to reduce outpatient medical utilization within Kaiser Permanente by 35% in the year subsequent to the medical evaluation (based on an analysis of 135,000 patients, average age 57 years).
Emergency room visits and hospitalization also significantly decrease in the year after evaluation. Financial savings are distinctly greater than the cost of the evaluation.
In addition, the database of standardized medical information on patients integrates well with any acute care system, improving its effectiveness and reducing the likelihood of fragmented care.
In short, the Preventive Health Services offered by the California Institutes of Preventive Medicine:
- reduce demand for acute medical services,
- more accurately allocate resources, and
- provide a new and meaningful platform upon which to base primary care and case management.
Seeing the whole picture matters profoundly!
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