No two medical practices are the same. The challenges each one deals with are often as varied as the faces that come through the door every day.
However, our experience in this sector has certainly shown us that a lot of clinics are currently struggling with a lot of the same high-level issues. Your functional medicine clinic may have a unique staff, location, and customer base, but the odds are good that you’re dealing with a lot of the same issues that most people in functional medicine face every day.
In fact, it’s probably one of these four issues.
We don’t have to tell you that functional medicine has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to awareness and acceptance from the broader public. And this is truly exemplified by the number of insurance companies that don’t recognize the value of functional medicine, and as a result, provide little to no coverage for these treatments.
The good news is that more and more people’s lives are being changed for the better by functional medicine. This movement will be led by more members of the general public raising their voices to providers and litigators, demanding that their functional medicine treatments be covered.
However, until the day when the playing field is level, most functional medicine practitioners will feel like they’re already facing Strike 1 when they open their clinic. The lack of insurance coverage means that most of your patients will have to pay out-of-pocket for your services. And that’s a significant barrier.
On a high level, it always helps for you to act as an advocate for your profession. This can include things like working with professional organizations like the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) to convince regulators and insurance companies that functional medicine deserves as much respect, consideration, and coverage as traditional medicine.
On a day-to-day level, you can consider doing the following:
Promote the Value of Your Work
If you want your patients to reach for their wallets, you need to reach their minds and their hearts. Use your website and your social media presence to spread the word about the great work your practice is doing. This can include case studies and testimonials that tell a clear before-and-after story of how functional medicine has changed someone’s life for the better.
It also helps to reshare and retweet other practice owners’ success stories. That just helps functional medicine as an industry.
Offer multiple payment options.
Make it as easy as possible for people to afford your services.
This may include offering merchant providers such as Stripe, Bluefin, or Propelr to your customers. This also includes flexible payment options such as cash pay or sliding scale fees. You may also want to talk to your patients about private insurance options that offer a health savings account (HSA) or a flexible spending account (FSA) plan.
Bonus Tip: You can also help your patients save money on the supplements you recommend by setting them up for autofill when you combine Cerbo+Fullscript.
As we explored in the previous section, traditional and functional medicine are not viewed the same way by the general public. One has been the norm for decades, and the other one is lesser known and currently fighting for traction and respect.
This means you’re often not just promoting your services, you’re defending them against misconceptions and skepticism. This can come from things like legacy attitudes towards medicine, to misinformation making its way online and quickly being accepted as the truth.
At the same time, the general public often takes their cues from medical professionals who don’t classify functional medicine as “real medicine” and may advise their patients against pursuing it. This makes things especially difficult for functional practitioners to collaborate with traditional doctors on a given patient’s treatment plan.
Once again, your web presence is your best friend in this regard, and it’s your best weapon against misinformation and skeptics.
An active social media presence allows you the opportunity to post infographics and videos that directly call out some of the myths and misconceptions that your would-be clients may have. Your website is the perfect place to post customer stories, case studies, and testimonials from people whose lives have been improved thanks to functional medicine.
Does posting on social media, or doing anything to market your practice, require time you don’t have? You can actually get AI to take care of a lot of it these days.
Functional medicine practitioners typically start out as a 1 or 2-person operation, which can quickly become stressful or even unsustainable.
When workdays and patient lists both start to grow longer, you may feel like it’s time to bring in someone to help you. This could take the form of another practitioner, an office manager, or maybe just a person to answer phone calls and emails.
However, we don’t have to tell you that hiring in this sector is not as easy as it sounds.
You probably:
Ironically, you’re often too busy to bring in help.
Don’t panic! Help is available!
You can consider adding a virtual assistant to your practice to help take some of the non-clinical tasks off your plate. They can be a game-changing addition because they’re able to handle a lot of time-consuming administrative tasks that eat up too much of your day, which are also probably the tasks you hate doing.
Before you hire a second practitioner, we would like to invite you to speak with a medical staffing expert. You may think another practitioner will ease your burden. But an expert can take a deeper dive into your operations and discover that adding an office manager may free up more of your time, at a lower cost.
They can also help you come up with a long-term staffing plan that helps you look ahead and avoid panic-based hires in the future.
Functional medicine practitioners are more aware than most that there aren’t enough hours in the day. They are under a tremendous amount of pressure to spend as much time with patients as humanly possible.
Aside from their endless to-do lists, functional medical practitioners face two massive problems when it comes to time constraints:
As a result, data shows that 71% of first-time functional medicine patient visits lasted 60 -120 minutes, compared to the average 15-minute or less visit time in conventional primary care.
Simply put, you need to spend more time before and after the appointment managing and documenting their treatment plans, while the actual appointments might be 4 - 8 times longer than the average traditional patient.
It’s easy to look at the above candle burning at both ends and simply assume that’s the nature of running a functional medicine clinic. It’s easy to say, “Our appointments are longer and more in-depth, and that’s all there is to that.”
But it doesn’t have to be that way. You’re probably never going to have a day full of 15-minute appointments. But you can see more patients, if you make a few operational tweaks.
Part of the problem is that too many functional medicine practitioners are struggling to use an EHR that wasn’t built for what they do. They’re spending time trying to make the software work for them, instead of the software working for them to save time.
Cerbo is tailored to the exact needs of functional medicine clinics. It supports diverse workflows and multiple integrations, serving as the leading technology solution within the functional and integrative medicine community.
“The implementation process was great. The team did an awesome job getting me set up with Cerbo. The support team is always very responsive and helpful. I also love the integration with Rupa and Precision Analytical. It has saved me a lot of time. The e-scribing is a great feature. In addition, the integration with supplements and medications is very helpful."
—Michelle Hinton APRN-FPA, Hinton Optimal Wellness.
