Great West Family & New West Medical Care Clinics

These are the subscription fees for New West Medical Care. Please see the Patient Handbook for details on how these fees contribute to your healthcare costs at our clinic.

• There is no “sign up” fee.
• First adult: $65/month
• Additional adult: $55/month [couple $120/mo]
• Children 0-18: $40/month

To become a patient at New West Medical Care, you must agree to and pay for a minimum three month membership. After that, you can pay monthly, quarterly, or annually. Annual pre-payments are discounted 10%.

After the first three months, you may cancel your membership with 30 days’ notice and receive back any unused dues paid after the minimum membership period.

Learn more about New West Medical Care and insurance free medicine…

New West Medical Care, our insurance-free clinic, is officially launched!  Instead of a practice burdened with copays, deductibles, denials and paperwork, New West offers you the same great preventive and primary care you have come to expect from us at Great West Family Care at an affordable cost.

New West is a direct medical practice, paid for directly by the patients. Without the expense of dealing with the mounds of paperwork and contracts with insurance, we can pass the savings on to you. A direct primary care practice charges a low monthly fee per patient per year, usually a fraction of an insurance premium. Because it is not an insurance plan, but more like a membership, there are no co-pays, no deductibles, no pre-existing conditions, no pre-approvals required by an insurance carrier.

Because it is not insurance, your membership covers only what we offer at both New West and Great West—but that’s plenty!  In fact, it is what most people need to stay healthy:  annual visits, pap smears, well-child care, acute care for injuries and illnesses and continuity care for chronic illnesses such as diabetes or hypertension.

Instead, you can purchase catastrophic health insurance for the unlikely event of a hospitalization, which is less expensive than a more comprehensive plan.  This combination saves you money and buys you more individual care than visits to an emergency room. Instead of getting your care at an urgent care or emergency room, you will have your own primary care doctor who knows you, your medical history, and works with you to maintain your good health.

To join New West, you can download the registration forms and handbook.  Bring in your signed forms and initial payment and make an appointment at your convenience! Also see our list of fees.

Breaking news:

We are in the process of becoming a hybrid medical clinic here in beautiful Vancouver, Washington! That is, we will have two parts: Great West Family Care, which accepts many insurances, and a new clinic that will be insurance-free!

If you have no insurance, have lost your insurance, cannot afford health insurance, our new clinic will offer you all the same services as Great West Family Care, but without insurance.

How? Through a new model called “direct medical practice.” Unlike the boutique or concierge models which can be quite expensive, a direct primary care practice charges a low monthly fee per patient per year, usually less than an insurance premium. Because it is not an insurance plan, but more like a membership, there are no co-pays, no deductibles, no pre-existing conditions, no pre-approvals required by an insurance carrier.

Instead of getting your care at an urgent care or emergency room, you will have your own primary care doctor who knows you, your medical history, and works with you to maintain your good health.

We will be launching the new clinic this summer! For updates, bookmark our web page and follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

You can read more about insurance-free clinics and their benefits here: If Doctors Had More Time to Listen (New York Times Online)

For a doctor, having privileges at a hospital mainly means that she or he has been accepted on staff.

To do this, a doctor must provide accurate and current information about education, training, licensure and board certification. They also have to indicate if there is a history of or pending legal proceedings (malpractice, misconduct) and explain them.  The hospital evaluates this along with peer recommendations and determines if you can become part of the staff.  This process is called “credentialing” and can be quite extensive; some hospitals go so far as to check your driving record, police reports, even your health.

Once on staff, there are usually two types of privileges.  More and more hospitals are employing more of their own doctors, known as “hospitalists” to handle in-patient admissions.  Doctors in the community are encouraged to admit their patients to the in-hospital staff for care; after treatment, patients are discharged back to the community doctor.  Hospitalists do not have practices in the community.   This type of privilege is often known as “community active” or “refer and follow” privileges.  That is, you can admit to the hospital, but are not allowed to write orders or manage in-patient cases.

Some doctors in the community do not use the hospitalists and admit and manage patients themselves. This type of privilege is known as “active” privileges.

Many primary care doctors elect to not have active privileges for the reason that hospital medicine is becoming quite different than outpatient medicine.  Since we handle so much more as outpatients now, the inpatient admission is often much more complicated and patients benefit from having doctors whose sole responsibility is the inpatient setting.

Retired doctors and visiting doctors from other communities or hospitals, can be granted temporary active privileges on a case-by-case basis.

Preventive Care: Doctors practicing preventive care help you put in place protocols for lifestyle and health management, so that, together, you can identify problems very early or even before they begin, as well as actions you can take to maintain good health. This includes procedures (colonoscopy, mammogram), lab tests (cholesterol, thyroid levels), vaccinations and lifestyle choices (diet, smoking, sleep). Protocols change over time based on evidence-based research; your family doctor stays current with them.

Primary Care is your point of entry into the health care system. For small problems (colds, injuries) and large (diabetes, depression, heart disease, etc), doctors offering primary care apply the expertise of their training and their connections to appropriate specialists and specialty services needed for each presenting issue. In addition to family medicine, which offers primary care to both adults and children, the medical specialties focused on primary care are internal medicine (adults) and pediatrics (children).

Did you know that Family Practice is a medical specialty requiring additional training, like other specialties–such as Surgery, Gastroenterology or Cardiology? The focus of Family Practice is primary care and preventive care. To become family doctors, following medical school, we had years of additional training in multiple disciplines, including pediatrics, obstetrics, adult medicine, critical care, psychiatry, geriatrics, and emergency care. As family doctors, we evaluate your health in the context of your family, personal relationships, community and work.

When you visit us, we listen to you, evaluate your symptoms, your body and your story; then we determine a diagnosis and develop a treatment plan. Simple problems may take a single visit. Complicated problems may require more.

As family doctors, we’re committed to your overall health. In addition to any problems you may bring, we’ll help you prevent others. We’ll ask about habits (smoking, drinking, exercise), life patterns (sleep, diet, mood), and protocols for prevention (vaccines, lab tests, procedures). By paying attention to how you live and promoting continued healthy choices and disease prevention, we’ll help you conquer unhealthy habits and prevent unhappy outcomes such as heart disease and diabetes.

While family doctors can manage nearly every problem a patient presents, we also know when to ask other specialists for help on your behalf. We maintain close connections with the whole medical community to ensure proper referral for specialized problems.

Here’s a specific list of what we can do for you as family doctors:

• Newborn and pediatric well child care
• Adolescent medicine
• Adult preventive care and annual exams
• Sports and DOT physicals
• Acute illness and injury care
• Pap smears, pelvic and breast exams, IUDs
• Acne, skin care and procedures
• Phlebotomy and routine lab tests (strep test, mono, pregnancy, urinalysis)
• Immunizations and joint injections
• Chronic illness management, including arthritis, asthma, COPD, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, overweight, and others
• Mental health care, such as depression and anxiety

We’ll also consider alternative care where appropriate in developing a treatment plan for you.

Dr. Rebecca Hoffman MD
Dr. Richard Carroll, DO