Integrative Primary Care: How Locally Founded Healthtopia is Charting a New Course in Medicine
Emergency departments are highly efficient operations designed for worst case scenarios, but with wait times for primary care extending to days or weeks, many people use them for less intensive needs. That’s a problem Healthtopia is looking to address.
Founded by board-certified emergency physician Dr. Joy Evers (formerly Hardison), Healthtopia is an integrative primary care practice with locations throughout San Diego County. Its mission statement is to bridge the gap between urgent care and primary care in a way that makes routine preventative medicine more accessible.
“I’m an ER doctor who’s trying to say we want to keep people out of the ER,” Dr. Evers said. “I have tons of respect for my profession and I think emergency physicians are extremely well-trained and have a skill set that is highly needed, but my goal would be to let them focus on what they do best: taking care of true emergencies.”
As an alternative to emergency departments, Dr. Evers said that Healthtopia is designed to be a “demonstration model” of how health care and preventative medicine can be delivered differently to meet needs that are not currently being met in the community. The practice currently has four locations in San Diego County, including in Encinitas, Rancho Santa Fe, Hillcrest, and Sorrento Valley.
At each Healthtopia facility, Dr. Evers functions as both a physician and a social entrepreneur. She specifically designed the Healthtopia model to reject the siloed nature of traditional US health care and bring together urgent care, primary care, and naturopathic medicine under one roof.
Patients have access to a collaborative team of 13 providers that includes medical doctors, naturopathic doctors, and nurse practitioners providing evidence-based holistic health services. Services range from real-time imaging and labs to nutrition counseling and nutraceuticals, which are food-derived products that provide medical or health benefits beyond nutrition.
The addition of naturopathic medicine in a clinical setting is unique, and Dr. Evers said that its inclusion stems from a long-time interest in a holistic, evidence-based approach to health.
“One of my ideas was to bring naturopathic medicine into the primary care setting, taking the best of both worlds,” she said. “Now we have patients seeing their primary care doctor and their naturopath in a deeply collaborative, integrated setting, instead of those factions being completely siloed.”
Beyond its unique model of care, the origin story of Healthtopia is close to home for Dr. Evers. It really began when her son broke his hand.
“I could have just brought my son to the ED, but that would be wasteful since it wasn’t life-threatening,” she said. “He just needed an X-ray and maybe a splint and a referral to orthopedics.”
The urgent care facility, however, were unable to do an X-ray and did not have the required supplies to splint the injury. Unwilling to let her son deal with the injury without treatment for a few days, she ended up going to the emergency department where she worked.
“What’s an ER doc mom to do?” Dr. Evers said. “I just put a splint on his arm myself and we followed up with orthopedics the next week. That got me thinking: what if there was a place where you could just walk in and someone could take care of it right then and there, outside of the emergency department?”
Dr. Evers’s idea did not end at Healthtopia, however. She has also been a vocal advocate for overhauling the US health care system from within. Along with writing and publishing thought leadership pieces for various publications, Dr. Evers also hosts a podcast titled “Your Doctor Wants to Quit: Conversations to Fix Our Broken Health Care System.” The show brings a candid insider’s perspective to the burnout and administrative roadblocks driving good doctors out of the profession.
“I think my whole career, I’ve really been the type of person that cares deeply about the patient in front of me, but also has the perspective that we need to improve the whole health care system,” Evers says. “It’s not like treating one person at a time is going to solve the systemic issues that we have.”
In the meantime, the collaborative and inclusive integrative primary care model at Healthtopia is helping to pave the way for broader change down the road.
“Our goal is to flip those statistics so that we can cover down on 80 percent of what people’s needs are at the primary care level so that they never end up needing to go to the ED,” she said.
Media Credit: Images courtesy of Healthtopia.