Jeff and Anna Hunter are a husband-and-wife duo who created Upstream Functional Medicine out of their own health journey to find health solutions so they could live out their purpose in life. Their vision is that others will be equipped and empowered to overcome their health challenges and fulfill their own life’s purpose as well.
Today, they are a very successful cash-pay model able to implement complex functional medicine for their practice members and retain long-term clients.
They are a team of 7, advancing this year to 10 highly effective team members, including several practitioners and an operator.
Some people are willing to accept an EHR/EMR solution that works “well enough.” Jeff Hunter (NP, IFMCP) is not that person.
He has described himself as “a little bit of a junkie around the EHR stuff,” who has helped a number of large organizations code and launch major solutions from the ground up.
These experiences helped him realize that their former solution was doing the bare minimum and would eventually become a barrier to scaling the business.
“You have to think about ‘How is the EHR company going to embrace change and serve us well?’ They were just not really there as a company,” said Hunter.
“We started off with a very inexpensive tool. We didn't know if we'd make any money or not. It had some features I liked, and it was a good fit for what we were doing. But I was also aware that there are much better ways to do this. If we want this to be more scalable and automated, then we're going to need a different tool than this.”
He added that he also simply did not like the way their old solution looked and felt. “It was chunky. Even the presentation of things just felt cheap, if you will. And if you use a tool all day, every day, you really want it to feel nice.”
When looking for Upstream’s next EHR software, Hunter put a high priority on data accessibility. He insisted on a tool that gave him the insights they needed to scale the business.
“Data gathering is really important to understand from the clinical side. Functional medicine requires better retrospective data. Even if we're not doing research studies, we need to be able to show certain practices yield certain kinds of results.”
Hunter added that he hopes to create the option to run the business remotely to allow more travel in the near future, and this would be impossible without readily available data.
After the switch to Cerbo, Hunter said that Upstream also benefited from Chart Parts in a major way.
“Chart Parts was a key piece. Because if you bring on more than one provider, you need to be able to have some kind of continuity in the way that we do things.”
When looking to scale their business, Upstream wasn’t simply looking for another EHR provider. They were looking for a strategic partner that would work side-by-side with them as they grew and scaled. And for Hunter, the difference between being a provider and a partner is the level of support you get when something goes wrong.
“There are some other pretty good EHRs out there, but then it's crickets when you try to get anything done,” said Hunter.
“Some companies grow too fast, or they're all about their tech, but they're not really about the support side, and there just has to be a level of support for tech. People need it. I need it, and I know a lot about it. And I'm sure other people need quite a bit of help sometimes.”
Today, Hunter says that Cerbo is one of the key reasons that Upstream Functional Medicine is such a highly effective and highly efficient business.
In fact, in observing other businesses, he’s recently realized that many other practices need 4 or 5 appointments to accomplish what Upstream covers in a single visit.
“The only reason we can do it that way is because the efficiencies are really high because we have a lot of structure in our templates and the way that we can import what we need,” said Hunter.
“We block prep time so that we can be ready for the appointment. We review the case, and then we use templates to create notes that are going to have some continuity. We want there to be a hundred different things that we actually accomplished in one appointment.”
As leaders in their field, Hunter is often asked about the best EHR on the market. When recommending Cerbo, he says he simply tells people to try Cerbo and lets the tool speak for itself.
