Pharos Family Medicine + Behavioral HealthA small practice
maintained as
a public formulary.
Six numbered services, fully indicated. A roster of five. Errata published quarterly. We work in plain sight, in the Rondout District of Kingston, New York, and we keep our reasoning where you can read it.
Most clinics tell you what they offer.
We tell you why, and what we won't.
A formulary is a deliberate document. It names indications, mechanism, dosage, contraindications, and the things that should make a careful clinician say no. We took the discipline of a drug compendium — the British National Formulary, the Tarascon Pocket Pharmacopoeia, DailyMed — and applied it to the practice itself. Each service has a code (CCH-001 through CCH-006), a fixed set of fields, and a stable set of references. When something changes we update the version stamp, write an erratum, and link to the prior text from the errata page.
The formulary is the practice. The practice is the formulary.
Adult primary care
Continuity care for adults from age 19 onward. Chronic disease management, USPSTF-aligned prevention, deprescribing as practice policy. Twelve-month rolling continuity ≥ 80%.
Pediatric & adolescent care
Bright Futures-aligned well-child schedule from 2 weeks through age 18. Reproductive and mental health for adolescents, with the confidentiality protections of NY Public Health Law § 17.
Behavioral health
Psychiatric evaluation and ongoing medication management; brief CBT/ACT; medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) and alcohol use disorder. We co-treat with community therapists; we do not run a therapy panel ourselves.
Reproductive & gender health
Contraception including same-day IUC and Nexplanon; preconception and prenatal coordination through the second trimester; menopause and perimenopause; gender-affirming hormone therapy on the informed-consent model.
Office procedures
Skin biopsies, cyst excision, joint and trigger-point injections, IUC and Nexplanon placement and removal, suturing, ear lavage, nail avulsion, and bedside ultrasound for relevant indications.
Acute & after-hours
Same-day acute slots Monday–Thursday, half-day Friday. After-hours phone line answered by the on-call clinician — not a triage script — between 17:30 and 22:00 weeknights and 09:00–18:00 weekends.
A clinic that will not write down what it refuses to do is a clinic that has not finished thinking.— Maren Vanderlyn, MD
From the preface to v2025.04. Read the full preface ⟶
We opened in October 2019, two blocks uphill from the Rondout Creek and one block from the lighthouse keeper's old house. Half of our charts that first year were people who had been bounced between three different practices in eighteen months and could not tell you, accurately, what was on their problem list. We decided we would publish ours.
Every service we deliver is named, scoped, indicated, contraindicated, and priced in a single place that does not move. When the indication changes — when, for example, the USPSTF moved aspirin for primary prevention to a D recommendation in adults 60+ — we update the relevant monograph, write down what we changed, and write down why. The old text stays available, dated, in the errata page. This is not a press release strategy. It is the discipline of a formulary, applied to ourselves.
We are five clinicians: two MDs, one DO, one family-trained NP, and one psychiatric NP. We are not a hospital and we are not a startup. We carry a panel of 1,640 active adults and 410 children, with a behavioral health panel of 312. We are credentialed on UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Empire BCBS, CDPHP, Fidelis, and traditional Medicare; we offer a low monthly membership for the uninsured. We refer to HealthAlliance Hospital Broadway Campus, two miles north, for hospital-based care.
Why we changed our mind, in writing.
On aspirin for primary prevention, and the friction between BNF and USPSTF.
When two careful bodies disagree, you owe the patient the disagreement, in their own language. We rewrote our hypertension intake script in February.
CCH-001PREVENTION B/2026-02-08 · 1,820 wordsBuprenorphine after the X-waiver. What changed for our intake.
The Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act removed the DEA X-waiver in 2023. We redesigned our front-desk script the following Monday.
CCH-003MOUD B/2026-01-22 · 1,560 wordsMenopause hormone therapy: rewriting an intake we got wrong for ten years.
A reading of the 2022 Menopause Society position statement, the cohort we belonged to in residency, and the apology we owe a small set of patients.
CCH-004PERIMENOPAUSE B/2025-12-04 · 1,440 wordsOn Wadar, errata, and the discipline of public correction.
Why a Dutch hydrographic back-end going live in December 2025 reminded us why we publish corrections at all.
PRACTICEMETHODThe intake form is short. The first appointment is sixty minutes.
If you'd like to be seen, fill out the three-page intake. We schedule a sixty-minute new-patient visit within ten business days for adult primary care, three to six business days for pediatrics, and two to four weeks for behavioral health depending on the current waitlist.
The intake asks plainly for your medical history, your current medications, your insurance, and the things you want us to know first. We will not ask for it twice.
Today's hours · Wed 06 May 2026
If you are in crisis
Call 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or go to the HealthAlliance Hospital Broadway Campus Emergency Department, 396 Broadway, Kingston. For chest pain, stroke symptoms, or major trauma, call 911.
References & Sources (cover)
- Pharos Family Medicine + Behavioral Health, internal continuity-of-care metric, computed quarterly per the operational definition in AHRQ — Closing the Quality Gap: Care Coordination, 2014; v2026.04 sample n = 1,617.
- British National Formulary online (BNF), Pharmaceutical Press / NICE — pharmaceuticalpress.com/bnf-and-bnfc/online.
- Tarascon Pocket Pharmacopoeia — special.tarascon.com.
- U.S. National Library of Medicine, DailyMed — dailymed.nlm.nih.gov.
- U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, Aspirin Use to Prevent Cardiovascular Disease: Preventive Medication, 2022 — uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org.
- HealthAlliance Hospital, Broadway Campus, Kingston NY — hahv.org.
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — 988lifeline.org.