Karis Medical Services – Formerly Riverwood Health MT

Karis Medical Services - Formerly Riverwood Health MT is a medical clinic in Helena, Montana. It operates as a direct primary care practice built around mobile health care units, offering visits for illness and urgent care needs, prescription management, chronic disease management, physical exams, well men's exams, well women's exams, well child checkups, and sports physicals. The clinic keeps extended hours, Monday through Friday from 8am to 7pm and Saturday from 10am to 3pm, longer than most primary care offices. It holds a rating of 3.80 based on 26 reviews.

Karis Medical was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic by Jeff Chandler, a Physician Assistant and the clinic's owner. Chandler has been a Physician Assistant since 2005, when he earned a Master's in Health Science and became Board Certified through the NCCPA. His practice began with a year of orthopedic surgery at the Hughston Clinic in Columbus, Georgia, followed by nearly a year in neurosurgery in Pensacola, Florida, and two years in pain management there before he moved into emergency medicine. He practiced emergency medicine from 2009 in Pensacola facilities and worked locum tenens in critical access areas in Montana and Georgia. In late September 2021 he became owner of Riverwood Health Montana in Helena.

The practice does not take insurance. Patients enroll in a subscription model, and the clinic can print a Superbill for patients to submit for reimbursement. Its mobile units carry lab testing, blood work, and X-ray imaging equipment, and when a service cannot be performed in the mobile office, patients are connected with a lab that can provide it. Chandler founded Karis Medical after finding that telemedicine alone could not substitute for physically examining a patient, and the mobile units were designed to combine the useful parts of telemedicine with in-person care. The clinic emphasizes preventive medicine alongside urgent care, aiming for frequent visits with a provider rather than waiting until a patient is seriously ill.