Alternative Medicine Integration, (AMI), founded in 1997, seeks to promote the integration of complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) into mainstream health care. By fully integrating CAM oriented providers and modalities into conventional managed health care systems, AMI co-founders James Zechman (CEO), and Richard Sarnat, M.D. (President), hope to transform America’s health care model from one based on treating illness, to one that focuses more on wellness and disease prevention.

Zechman and Sarnat started their innovative campaign in Illinois, successfully encouraging the state’s largest health insurance company to broaden its definition of a primary care physician (PCP). AMI’s affiliation with HMO Illinois (a Blue Cross/Blue Shield company), allows members—for the first time ever and at no additional cost—to select a holistic MD/DO or fully credentialed doctor of chiropractic as their PCP. While Illinois is among the states that already license chiropractors as PCPs, managed care networks have long considered payments to such doctors to be “out of network, out of pocket” expenses.

AMI’s holistic Primary Care Providers (PCP’s) are integrated with a rapidly expanding with a rapidly expanding network of 2,500 specialist M.D.s and more than a dozen hospitals, several of which are university-affiliated.

Evolving from our unique integrative medical model serving an HMO population, AMI has recently adapted it’s medical model to the areas of: PPO, Wellness and Prevention Programs and Integrative chronic pain management .

Board of Directors

Marshall Field V, Chairman, The Field Corporation
Fred O. Goldman, CFO, Equitec Proprietary Markets
Richard Sarnat, M.D., President, Alternative Medicine Integration
James F. Winterstein, D.C., President, National University of Health Sciences
James Zechman, Chairman and CEO, Alternative Medicine Integration