Yes. Manske Mobile Medicine is not insurance. It’s strongly advised that you maintain health insurance to cover labs, imaging, medications, vaccines, surgeries, ED visits, urgent care, specialists, other testing, hospital admissions, and preventive screenings such as mammograms and colonoscopies.

Yes — if you have private or marketplace insurance coverage. You may also be able to use HSA funds toward your care (check with your HSA for specific rules). Request a printed superbill at the time of your visit to submit to your insurance company or HSA.

No — reimbursement isn’t available for Medicare or Medicaid patients. Dr. Simpson-Manske has opted out of both programs, as they don’t cover care outside the corporate medicine structure. This opt-out applies only to her direct visits — Medicare and Medicaid will still cover labs, specialists, imaging, and inpatient care that she orders or refers you for. Medicare and Medicaid patients must sign a waiver acknowledging this before starting care.

No — house calls are the standard for this practice. There’s currently no brick-and-mortar exam room. If an office visit works better for you, that can be arranged with a private meeting place. Telehealth visits may also be offered when appropriate.

Yes — telemedicine is available for follow-ups, medication questions, minor concerns, and triage, especially when weather or ferry schedules make an in-person visit difficult. Not every medical concern is telehealth-appropriate, and new patients are routinely seen in person for their first visit.

Both are direct-pay, with no insurance billing either way. Single-visit pricing means you pay only for the visit you need, with no ongoing commitment. Cypress Care membership offers guaranteed access and continuity, including up to 6 MD visits per 12-month period plus discounts on additional visits, IV hydration, lab draws, and after-hours services.

Up to 6 MD visits per year (in person or telehealth, with at least 1 in-person visit required), discounted pricing on additional visits, IV hydration, lab draws, and after-hours services, unlimited portal messaging on problems currently being managed, and unlimited during-hours phone calls.

Call 911 first. This practice does not manage sudden, life-threatening issues — including broken bones, head trauma, hemorrhage, new seizure, stroke, heart attack, or loss of consciousness. After you call 911, you can call Dr. Simpson-Manske.

Corporate-style medicine and insurance have become obstacles to old-fashioned medical care, the kind our grandparents experienced. They create incentives to spend less time with patients, less time listening, and less time doing what patients actually need. This is the fast-food style of medicine. The oldest tool in medicine is time, and patients need more of it now than ever, not less. Removing these obstacles lets us return to old-fashioned medicine. If you’re curious to learn more, see Dr. Victoria Sweet’s books:

• God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (2012)
• Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing (2017)
• Convictions: A Story of Medicine in the Twenty-First Century (2025)

Old-fashioned medicine — the kind Dr. Simpson-Manske’s great-grandfather practiced in his country town in Ohio, population 360, back in the 1940s-1950s. He knew his patients, their families, and their histories, and he gave them the time they needed. That’s the standard Manske Mobile Medicine is built on.

The most important tool your doctor has: TIME.

Patients are not one visit, one problem, in 15 minutes. We are complex humans who deserve time to understand how one problem connects to our other medical issues, personal issues, and psychosocial issues — and how a treatment will impact the entire person: the other medications we take, the side effects it may create, the improvement it may bring, and the balance of everything else going on in our lives.

What we eat, how we sleep, exercise, and other lifestyle choices, family history, experiences in childhood and young adulthood, adult traumas, our beliefs about medicine, our family’s cultural beliefs, our socioeconomic status, housing status, ability to access care, and ability to access dental care — all of it impacts our health, including our current health.

Time allows us to identify issues that may not have surfaced as a problem in the past — symptoms a patient has normalized as “it’s just me.” But that may actually be a clue to an underlying medical issue driving the problem you’re having now.

Time also gives us the ability to follow a patient over time and follow up in a meaningful way — to determine whether a treatment is actually working, and to collaborate on a plan that’s individualized for you, not pulled from a cookie-cutter algorithm.

Corporate medicine has hijacked the time we spend with our patients. Our most important tool has been taken away, and patients are not getting the care they know they need. Manske Mobile Medicine exists to give that time back.

Slow medicine, the time to talk to the patient, gives us the opportunity to engage in shared decision making:

Discussion of the various options available, including the recommended ones, followed by working through those options together to find the path that’s right for you.

Chronic care is like caring for your favorite handmade sweater — the one grandma knitted for you. Everyone’s sweater is unique and different.

With complex medical symptoms or diagnoses, getting to the nuggets and grains of important medical information is challenging and time-consuming. It is often buried in mountains of unhelpful information required to be collected by insurance companies and required by regulatory bodies, or found hidden within ourselves — symptoms we have buried and rationalized as “normal, for me.” I meet the patient where they are — which is a place that is not logical and not linear. I pull on one thread to sort out a single problem, and three more threads unravel, dropping into my lap. Suddenly I have a sweater with a seriously large hole in it — and there’s a certain amount of work I have to do that same day, at that same visit, to repair the sweater enough for the patient to wear it out of the room, and get to the next visit. At the next visit, we work on more details of that repair — making it look and feel better.

But at the follow-up visit, we work on repairing the previous hole and gently tug on another thread — and another three problems fall into your lap. Now there’s a second large hole, plus a previously partially repaired one. Most of the time, the patient doesn’t understand the significance of the visit and can’t explain why they need to come back — until 6 to 12 months later, after monthly visits spent pulling threads and repairing holes, when they realize they are feeling better and doing more. Then we start spreading out those visits, because the holes are now nearly invisible, and gently pulling on a thread no longer unravels three more problems. It is beautiful to watch these complex patients gradually improve over time.

The thought of pulling on a thread and then letting a patient leave the room with a gaping hole of unraveled threads — side effects, medication interactions, complications from under-treatment or over-treatment because of the impact of accidentally unraveling adjacent threads — is something I have not been able to come to terms with. A rushed, 15- minute complex visit generates numerous messages and phone calls, both to me and my staff, to problem-solve these complications outside of the visit.

When patients experience these problems without anticipatory guidance, they don’t tend to return — instead they move on to the next provider and say the change or medication didn’t work, that the provider didn’t explain why, or didn’t tell them their kidney function was too low, and they don’t want to try the same medication or plan again. Time, and the ability to anticipate what unravels next, changes that outcome.

Every service is charged individually- including phone calls and refills. There is a surcharge for afterhours and weekends as well.

Dr. Jennifer Simpson-Manske brings 29 years of experience to Manske Mobile Medicine in family medicine, pediatrics, prenatal care, labor and delivery, inpatient adult and pediatric care, as well as full-spectrum outpatient care.

Her career has been rooted in public health, serving communities where access to care is often hardest to come by. She began at Healthcare for the Homeless in Dayton, Ohio, then spent years with the Indian Health Service in Gallup, New Mexico, before joining La Familia Medical Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For the last 6.5 years, she has journeyed through corporate medicine, giving her a clear, firsthand understanding of how corporate medicine is failing patients and doctors alike — and reinforcing her commitment to the kind of unhurried, personal care Manske Mobile Medicine now offers.

That background shapes how she practices today: care that meets patients where they are, treats the whole person and the whole family, and doesn’t assume everyone has easy access to a clinic — a philosophy that translates naturally to mobile medicine on the islands.

Dr. Simpson-Manske is a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and completed her residency in Family Medicine at the University of Rochester, New York, which emphasized the biopsychosocial model of medicine.

In January 2023, Dr. Simpson-Manske moved from the high desert of New Mexico to Orcas Island to provide healthcare to the residents and visitors of this lovely community.