Follow-up visits
Follow-ups that take the full thirty minutes.
Most medication follow-ups in modern psychiatry run five to fifteen minutes, which is enough time to renew a prescription and not much else. Follow-ups here run a full thirty, because the decisions that keep a medication working, or catch it failing, do not fit inside a refill. Your measures, your side effects, your sleep, your labs: all of it gets reviewed, out loud, with time to think before anything changes.
PsychMed Care is the medication management practice of Solutions Psychiatry. If you are looking for therapy, or therapy and medication together, the full practice is at psych.us.
Inside the visit
What thirty minutes actually covers
Your measures, first
The same brief screeners you can take on this site, scored and compared against your own trend. Progress becomes something we can point at, not a feeling we argue about.
Side effects, in plain terms
The ones you expected, the ones you did not, and the ones you were embarrassed to mention. Each gets weighed honestly against what the medication is earning.
Sleep and the life around the dose
Medication works inside a life: work load, grief, a new baby, a bad month. The plan bends around reality instead of pretending reality will bend around the plan.
Labs and GeneSight, when they land
Pending results get read in context and folded into the decision, whether that is a dose move, a supplement, or permission to leave things exactly as they are.
One change at a time
If something changes, it changes singly and deliberately, so the next visit can tell us what the change did. Two changes at once teach us nothing.
Brief focused support
When a skill or a reframe would help the medication plan hold, we use the minutes for it: brief focused therapy inside the visit, in service of the plan.
The rhythm
Closer together at first, wider as you stabilize
Care has a tempo. In the first weeks of a new medication, follow-ups sit closer together, because that is when side effects speak up and doses find their level. As your measures flatten into the range we targeted, visits space out, and the work shifts to protecting the result: sleep, stress load, the early signs you have learned to recognize in yourself. Tapering has its own tempo, slower still, with check-ins paced to symptoms rather than to a calendar grid.
Between visits, you are not on your own. Refills are handled inside this rhythm at your follow-ups, and if something cannot wait, the patient portal and the practice phone, (800) 303-3221, reach a human process rather than a void. The rule is simple: you should never have to choose between running out of a medication and booking a visit you do not need. Tell us early, and the rhythm adjusts.
Why does the length matter so much? Because every shortcut in a short visit is paid for later. The side effect nobody asked about becomes the reason someone quietly stops a working medication. The lab nobody reviewed becomes the diagnosis everybody missed. Thirty minutes is not a luxury format; it is the amount of time careful medication work actually takes, priced honestly and scheduled deliberately.
There is a second, quieter reason. Medication decisions are forecasts, and forecasts improve when the forecaster hears the whole weather report. In thirty minutes there is room for the detail that did not make your symptom list: the shift change at work, the parent who got sick, the week your sleep collapsed before your mood did. Those details routinely change what the right next step is, and they are exactly what a five-minute visit trains patients to stop mentioning. Here, mention them. The visit is built to hold them, and the plan that comes out of it is built from your actual life rather than from the average patient's.
Hold or change
What a follow-up decides, either way
When we hold the plan
Holding is a decision, not a default. We hold when the measures are moving the right way and the timeline has not run out, when a side effect is fading on schedule, or when life just handed you a storm that no dose should be asked to outshout. A good hold comes with a reason and a date to reassess it.
When we change the plan
We change when the target date arrives without the target, when a side effect costs more than the medication earns, when a lab or a genetic result redraws the map, or when you simply say this is not working for your life. One change, made cleanly, with the next check already on the calendar.
What it costs
The follow-up, priced plainly
Follow-up visit
$250 self-pay
Thirty minutes with the clinician who prescribes for you: measures reviewed, side effects weighed, the plan adjusted on purpose.
With insurance
$0 to $40 typical copay
The range for the majority of plans. Your exact copay is verified before your first appointment, so the number is never a surprise.
New patient evaluation
$350 self-pay
Where every follow-up story starts: a comprehensive 60-minute intake that sets the targets your follow-ups will be measured against.
The full service
Follow-ups are one movement inside medication management as a whole.
Want full therapy sessions too?
Medication visits here include brief focused support. Standalone psychotherapy, and therapy combined with medication from one clinician, live at the full practice.
“A refill takes thirty seconds. A follow-up should take thirty minutes, and here it does.”
New here? Everything starts with the 60-minute evaluation