Next question from Trevor. “When you do the initial intake or even follow-ups on a patient, are you willing to use labs that have been done by a previous provider? How recent do you require them to be?”
Chris: It depends on the kind of test. If it’s blood work, it really needs to have been within the last month or two. Obviously, if it’s a genetic test, it doesn’t matter when it was because those aren’t going to change. Stool testing also should be fairly recent because it can change quite a bit. Typically, we’re looking for labs within the past couple of months unless they are markers that are not likely to change over time, but we will look at labs as part of the case review. I want people to submit prior labs because I’ll look back, and I’ll see what the patterns were over time, and that informs my diagnostic— how I think about what’s going on with them. Even though we won’t use those labs, it typically is part of the case review, and we’ll suggest that they get more recent labs. We still look at some of their historical labs during the case review.