What does it take to bring functional medicine into mainstream insurance systems?
In this episode of The Evolution of Medicine, James Maskell speaks with Dr. Robin Berzin about Parsley Health’s landmark achievement: becoming the first functional medicine clinic in-network with insurance coverage for 150 million lives.
They explore how a decade of building standardized protocols, training systems, and outcomes data led to proof of both clinical results and cost savings in chronic disease care.
The conversation also unpacks what this shift means for independent functional medicine practitioners, and how AI, wearables, and direct-to-consumer testing are reshaping patient expectations and expanding the market for personalized medicine.
About the Guest:
Dr. Robin Berzin is a physician and the founder and CEO of Parsley Health, a functional medicine and longevity clinic focused on treating chronic disease through a systems-based, root-cause approach. She has built Parsley Health into a nationally scaled clinical model that integrates evidence-based protocols, digital health tools, and outcomes tracking to deliver personalized, preventive care.
Website: https://www.parsleyhealth.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/parsleyhealth/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parsleyhealth/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/parsley-health/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@parsleyhealth
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About the Host:
James Maskell is a healthcare entrepreneur and founder of The Evolution of Medicine. For over 20 years, he has worked to scale functional medicine through community-driven models, group visits, and practitioner infrastructure. His work focuses on moving medicine upstream – toward prevention, lifestyle intervention, and systems-based care.
Website: https://www.jamesmaskell.com/
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Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/FunctionalForum
Evolution of Medicine™ Mission Partners:
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Transcript:
If we could track outcomes and show that this medicine worked, right? That it reduced costs, that it resolved chronic disease, that it improved overall health status, that it engaged patients, that we would have a shot at embedding it in the wider healthcare system. And my vision in starting Parsley Health was really, it was really about how do we scale functional medicine?
How do we get this kind of care into the wider healthcare system? Because if we were all had the choice, we’d all want a functional medicine doctor as our primary doctor, but that hasn’t been accessible to everyone. And so the data has been a big piece of our evolution. Hello, and welcome back to the Evolution of Medicine Podcast.
I’m your host, James Maskell, and this week we have an exclusive interview with someone who is breaking the biggest news in functional medicine of the year. Dr. Robin Berzin is the CEO and founder of Parsley Health. She’s been growing this business for over a decade. And today, you’re gonna hear a massive announcement that has implications for you as a practitioner, and no matter where you’re practicing, no matter what your business model, I think you’re gonna be blown away.
Now, what are the implications? Well, let’s discuss together. I’m feeling called after recording this episode to set up some weekly time where we can talk together to see what are the implications for my practice. What should I be doing differently with this news? It is that big. So, I don’t wanna give it too, too much away, so enjoy.
Hello, and welcome back to the Evolution of Medicine Podcast. We have got an exceptional podcast for you today, because we have an exceptional guest, Dr. Robin Berzin, at one point held the record for coming on the functional forum the most number of times. But you may know her as the CEO and founder of Parsley Health.
Um, but before she was that, she was also, like, the second guest on the functional forum back in 2014, as the sort of leading expert in the cross-section of technology and functional medicine, which has been sort of a huge topic throughout the years and something we are consistently on. Parsley Health has grown to be a national brand with, uh, centers in different cities and also many physicians working for it.
I’ve referenced it so many times over the years as what it takes to build a brand where practitioners follow the same, you know, standards of care, and that’s taken a, you know, so much effort and work. I think a couple years ago, we did in a, a podcast called The One Woman Evolution of Medicine, because, like, it’s just, you know, you were a hero of my first book.
And, um, we are here today because we have very exciting news in the, in the field of where Parsley Health is going that is, has implications for everyone in the field. Robin, I just, uh, I’m so grateful that you’re on here to share and, uh, grateful to have you back on the podcast. Oh, that was quite the introduction, James.
Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here. I think I got it all right, didn’t I? You did. You got it all right. I didn’t know I had such stats with the podcast in the functional forum though. I’d forgotten that. Wow. Thanks for reminding me. Yeah. And the on, you know, you know, frequent guest. Leaderboard, on the leaderboard.
The leaderboard. I remember also going to, uh … Do you remember going to HuffPost live and doing a session there? And you know, how crazy that then, I think you were just Robin Berzin MD, but now here you are. Jeff Gladby. I’m still just Robin VersamMD. Yeah, Dr., Dr. Jeff Gladd was the other speaker. Now he’s the chief medical officer of FullScripts, like a billion dollar company.
You know, so it’s, it’s crazy that, uh, you know, here we are. It’s not crazy in a certain way, right? At the beginning, understanding the technology and building towards the future. So give us, catch us up to date with, you know, Parsley last time we spoke. I know that, you know, you had shared with me, you had incredible, you know, from doing the membership model for a long time, you had gathered an incredible amount of data about the outcomes that you had generated.
You know, we’ve been, we spoke then. As you said on the very first time that we were there, that you had to … Tracking the outcomes was critical to moving the, the movement forward, and that the benefit of tracking those outcomes would sort of have an ex- exponential effect. And I think part of what we’re gonna talk about today is, is built on that, right?
Absolutely. I mean, I remember having a data scientist on staff when we didn’t really have any data but I knew that if we could track outcomes and show that this medicine worked, right? That it reduced costs, that it resolved chronic disease, that it improved overall health status, that it engaged patients, that we would have a shot at embedding it in the wider healthcare system.
And my vision in starting Parsley Health was really, you know, we talked about this a lot at the time, not starting a medical practice. It was really about how do we scale functional medicine? How do we get this kind of care into the wider healthcare system? Because if we were, all had the choice, we’d all want a functional medicine doctor as our primary doctor, but that hasn’t been accessible to everyone.
And so the data has been a big piece of our evolution and also the news that we have to share today. Well, why don’t we just get into it because I’m sure everyone is excited to hear and, uh, you know, ultimately I think it’s a continuation of that vision moving in, into the rest of the world. Yes. So exciting announcement.
Thank you for having me on to share. We are now in network. Parsley Health is the first and only functional medicine and longevity clinic that is in network nationwide for 150 million covered lived, lives, hundreds of commercial plans, and it’s really a culmination of my dream and why I started the company.
So it’s a huge milestone. For Parsley as a business, certainly for me personally and for, I think, the wider healthcare system that is now poised and set up to integrate this kind of care broadly. That’s wonderful. So take us on that journey, you know, because I think a lot of practitioners who are listening to this maybe, you know, feel that they get great outcomes in their practice and, you know, have thought there might be a way to do it.
I think there’s probably … They, they’ve seen certain things in the way, right? They’ve seen that insurance doesn’t believe in functional medicine and, uh, I can’t do it with the codes that are in functional medicine. And my standard of care is better and takes longer and therefore it doesn’t fit into the, into that paradigm, but obviously something has happened that has, has changed those rules.
So what, what’s changed? Well, I think, you know, for a lot of functional medicine practices, th- that, all of that is fair and in some cases true, right? If you are operating in a true concierge model that is very expensive and working with just a handful of patients at a time, some of those constraints may be real for you.
And so I wanna, like, honor that, that for a lot of people, there are real constraints, right? Functional medicine isn’t separately recognized by the payer system. It is clunky and expensive to manage in- network billing, period, right? It’s costly to us as providers. I think what’s unique for Parsley is a couple of things, and we
The fact that we’ve really been building towards this over time. Number one, we built from day one a scaled model where we standardized the care. We built the first fully evidence-based based set of protocols in functional medicine. We built our own fellowship training so we could train board certified conventional providers in this medicine.
Um, we built tools, data tools that would track outcomes like the Parsley Symptom Index, which is a validated symptom score that evaluates nine body symptoms, and which we’ve published in the medical literature, in peer-reviewed literature multiple times, and which is validated against PROMISE-10 to allow us to track outcomes.
We really built an infrastructure that would allow us to standardize care, scale care, and track outcomes. And then later on, we worked with an independent actuarial firm, which is a fancy word for a company that evaluates health cost data and showed that Parsley’s care saves money in a high cost chronic patient population because at the end of the day, the payers are interested in cost savings, right?
Especially on the commercial side, um, or really in every part. But in the commercial side, they have their patients or their members on average for, like, 18 months. And so there’s so much in and out, there’s not as much long-term, and so they really need to show that a service is net neutral or cost savings.
And so, you know, quite frankly, only because Parsley was built as a scaled model, venture back, so we had some capital to put towards some of these problems and questions and this kind of research and validation, were we able to sort of slowly, and it took a long time, Parsley is officially a decade old as of a couple months ago- Yeah.
so this is not overnight. Um, slowly, in a cash world, we were able to build this infrastructure that was always designed to eventually get here. And in doing that, we also built infrastructure to handle billing. Um, revenue cycle management is a beast. Uh, it requires a lot of care and feeding and tech integrations and management.
It’s never perfect. And so we built all of that infrastructure over time so that it could actually, you know, make sense for us to do this. Yeah, that’s interesting. My feeling is, um, you know, what I’ve heard from other people, I’ve, I, I, I met a guy who worked for UnitedHealth for 22 years, who had, who had taken two holistic modalities, chiropractic, I think, to United and then acupuncture to the New York Health Plan, uh, the Empire Health Plan, which serves, I think, a million seven.
York employees, state employees, and he said that, you know, in order to get these kind of things done, you really had to sort of, like, own the whole infrastructure. It’s like they, these people don’t wanna do it. Like Parsley has to sort of own the whole thing or an organization would have to sort of own the whole thing- Yeah.
from end to end. Has that been your experience? Yeah. I mean, I think for us being able to demonstrate that we have the infrastructure that allows us to build a payer without sort of crushing us um, that we have the patient volumes, frankly, that the payers care about. Like, the payers don’t care about very tiny practices, right?
Um, unfortunately, because everything for them is based on, you know, hu- like you said, so this one plan in New York has over a million people, right? They’re dealing with huge numbers. Yeah. And ultimately, they also need something that works within the way that they work. And so we had to do a lot over the years to kind of get ready for that.
And we had our outcomes data in hand, and we had our infrastructure in hand, and we had our track record of seeing thousands and thousands of patients in New York in hand, and our first health plan launched in 23, which was Aetna, New York. So one sort of local health plan was where we started three years ago.
And that was us quietly building towards 150 million covered lives, but it, we knew that we had to start with one. We then expanded to, through partnership and with Mount Sinai, we also had to go through a lot of hurdles and proof points with them. They had to feel confident and comfortable partnering with a private clinic like ours, a telehealth clinic like ours, although we do have a brick and mortar in New York, which I’m sitting in right now, but we’re largely telehealth based.
And they had to … I had to do so many calls with various people across their leadership on what this medicine is, how it works, it’s legitimacy, it’s safety. There’s a lot of hands to hold and convincing to do. And so we did that, and then we expanded to a couple of plans in California and the Pacific Northwest, and it was just very slow.
Um, and then ultimately, that foundation, however, was really the unlock to expand much more rapidly. You know, we couldn’t have done it overnight, and we couldn’t have done what we’ve just done if we hadn’t started where we started. Yeah, it’s amazing. So, uh, what, what are the disease categories or the disease types where you were able to show that you outperform conventional care?
You know, where they played the most attention and where we had the best data were some of these really high cost conditions. Autoimmune is a huge one, right? While a small percentage of the population, these conditions are extremely expensive, especially because of the high utilization of biologic drugs.
Um, the biologics can be 30 grand a year and because these conditions don’t go away, right? They’re not conditions that, “Hey, this year was really expensive, you had a baby, or you had a knee replacement, and then it’s done.” For employers and for our healthcare system and for the payers, these are conditions that last decades, right?
So they’re expensive for a long time. And so autoimmune is where we have really exceptional outcomes data, one area. The next one is GI. So everything from the autoimmune GI conditions, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s, celiac, right, and then of course, IBS, GERD, right? Some of these GI conditions, while not autoimmune and maybe slightly less severe, also are very chronic and very costly.
They end up with lots of procedures, lots of colonoscopies, endoscopies, meds, and they also tend to l- last a long time and kind of really gig people through the healthcare system. Others are in the, others are the women’s health space, so a lot around fertility and menopause. You know, I wish that every single woman would go through the Parsley program from a year to six months at least before she tries to get pregnant or wants to get pregnant.
There’s so much we can do to help women conceive on their own and avoid IVF, which is also a very costly and time-consuming experience. And for those who need IVF, which is great, we support a much healthier end-to-end IVF cycle and more successful cycles by going through the Parsley program to optimize all these aspects of health.
Mental health, that one also, it’s harder to qualify cost in mental health, although the world at large has started to do it, so there are some benchmarks there, but we have huge impact on mental health, and then of course, heart health and metabolic health. And so in these areas, you know, different payers, different employers care more or less about different ones depending on what’s hitting their bottom line, quite frankly, um- Yeah.
from a cost perspective. But what all of these conditions have in common for anyone listening and, you know, if you’re in functional medicine, the beauty of functional medicine and what I would always explain to payers in my conversations with them and where I frankly had the hardest time kind of getting credit or getting understanding is that functional medicine addresses multiple conditions at once, right?
It helps the whole system reset. It helps the whole system improve health status. It will address metabolic health and inflammation and hormonal health all in one program. And so we can think about the conditions, but I always tried to make sure that the payers were understanding to look at overall cost structure, overall health status, and overall system utilization, because even though it might take us two years, three years to move the needle on an autoimmune disease, we still would be moving the needle on all these other things in the meantime.
Um, and we would be also moving the needle on utilization when it came to how many drugs people were on and how many specialists they were seeing. Um, and that you could see in the data pretty quickly, and that was also, I think, meaningful for them. That’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a, such a, a great journey.
I love the idea of seeing where the most cost is being eaten and then going after those areas. I think autoimmune is, is super obvious on that end, but the fertility thing is a big deal too. I know, you know, just been doing some research on the fertility industry and how it’s sold and how it’s organized, you know, that’s significant cost.
And, you know, so just, just for context, so this is commercial payers. You, there’s no Medicare, there’s no Medicaid yet. This is just sort of like the 25 to 65 in, um, in commercial plans through employers or through otherwise. Yes. So this is all commercial. So this is the 150 million or so commercially insured live.
So these are your Uniteds and your Aetnas and your Blues plans, right? The kind of insurance that you have through your employer or maybe through an exchange, the Oscars of the world. We are not yet in network with government plans, so the Medicares and Medicaids are a whole separate conversation, but- Yeah.
we think that this paves the way for that as well. Wonderful. Well, look, I guess before we go any further, I just wanna say congratulations- … Because, you know, you’re living the dream that we talked about 12 years ago and, and, uh, you know, as we, as our friendship has continued over the years in different, you know, places and times, it’s been just amazing to see you, you know, continue to take that ground.
And, you know, I, I see that the value of what you’ve created just continues to compound moving forward as the, the data validation, relationship capital, proof points, you know, that journey moves forward and hope that this is the beginning of, you know, another amazing chapter that, and we’ll come back in a few years and there’ll be some other incredible ground that’s been taken.
So I just wanna, like, salute you on that. I do wanna have a slightly awkward conversation with you though because the people who listen to this are the functional medicine doctors around the country and some around the world. And I think for the people around the world, this will be very exciting and satisfying because ultimately, I think everyone has dreamt of this kind of moment happening if you’ve been in this space coming into the mainstream.
But, um, I wanna have a, a, a conversation about how independent functional medicine clinics should think about this news because in my judgment, my first flush of feeling is that, hey, if your whole marketing shtick has been like, “Hey, insurance doesn’t do functional medicine, you have to go out to do cash to do it, and I’m the guy,” you know, uh, that is probably gonna be tested a little bit.
Obviously, there’s not perfect information, you know, across, across the industry, so people won’t necessarily know that. You know, my feeling, my, my encouragement over the years has been, you gotta, we gotta be better. You gotta do things locally that, that maybe you can’t get through a, a pastor telemedicine service.
Mm-hmm. And that looks like, one, the thing going for you is, is you, the provider, right, the relationship that you have in your town, you’re trusted, you’re connected, you know the resources that are there locally, that’s an advantage over a nationwide telemedicine center. Or, you know, you’ve gotta do things that maybe partially can’t do.
So I’ve been talking about going after the hardest possible cases, the really rough, you know, the, the really rough cases where people come in with, you know, all, all the environmental illness. And I’ve, I’ve had a particular focus on cognitive decline because that’s something that I just feel like is, is the hardest part of functional medicine, because you’ve got all of these root causes, they’re all interacting, you got these very complicated patient cases.
So that’s been my thesis. And I just wonder if you agree, and if you put yourself in a seat of someone who’s now maybe starting a functional medicine clinic and, or has been doing it for a while reasonably successfully, the ground is shaping, shaking underneath them. Some of it is coming from Parsley Health, and some of it’s coming from AI and ChatGPT, and some of it’s coming from Function Health, but am I right in thinking that the ground is shaking beneath your feet?
It’s not the same situation as it was 10 years ago. Just wanted to take a moment to thank our mission partners for helping bring this podcast to you. As you know, we are in the business of building a network of clinics that can reverse cognitive decline, and our partners in that are organizations. You can find out more if you go to goevomed.com and look at the mission partners.
But first and foremost, TruNeura. If you go to truneura.com, you can get a demo. Um, this is the underlying software that will connect this network of clinics, and we have an incredible mastermind session, a lot of cool stuff coming out of that company. Um, you can see here, uh, FullScript, thanks to FullScript with FullScript where we’re gonna help you take advantage of the tools that they have, um, to compete with things like ChatGPT and Function Health.
It’s gonna be awesome. Go to goevomed.com/fullscript. Uh, bigboost.marketing, if you need patients for your clinic, uh, or if you have any marketing needs, goevomed.com/bigboost is, uh, Premier’s, uh, supporter in that world. And then please, uh, also check out Freedom Practice Coaching, built and scaled a very successful brain health practice and has been instrumental in helping practitioners with the non-clinical aspects of running a practice doing this.
These are our mission partners. These are people that I know well. These are people that are top of their sphere and really excited to bring you, uh, the rest of the podcast. Enjoy. You know, my response to that is a couple of thoughts. First of all, I think that … Listen, you’re right, it’s not 10 years ago, right?
It was Google, now it’s ChatGPT and Claude, right? People are empowered with information. They’re able to buy their own diagnostic tests from Parsley has longevity labs nationwide through Quest. Quest has their own labs direct to consumer. They have a full set of functional medicine labs that you can buy straight from Quest.
You know, there’s a huge amount of DIY in the market. I’m an advisor to Whoop, the wearable company and wearables like Whoop and Aura and others have, are giving people data in the palm of their hands that used to be like data that you would only get in the hospital or something. I mean, it’s really incredible.
And so we do live in a new world and we can’t, we, we can’t hide from it, right? And at the same time, I think that there’s not a winner take all here. The market is huge and the market’s only expanding. Search for the words functional medicine and related terms has gone up 300% in the past couple of years.
Uh, huge forces around longevity, the rise of consumer health, where something like 90% of Americans now say health and wellness is a top priority according to McKinsey research, the, uh, maha movement, whether you love it or hate it or somewhere in between, you know, all of these things are conspiring to expand the market and the consumer base and the patient base for all of us.
And what used to be, frankly, when I started, parsley was before its time. This type of medicine was really niche. And in the past couple of years, I’m so grateful to all of the companies and all of the providers in the space and all the doctors writing books and the fact that Oprah Daly and Maria Schreiber and all these folks are covering functional medicine and have interviewed me, like getting this into the zeitgeist and expanding what this idea of whether you call it functional medicine or personalized medicine or preventive medicine or lifestyle medicine or medicine 3.0, right?
These are all names f- for different things, certainly, but related things. This idea that the average person wants more from their healthcare, they want more from their doctor, they want a medical service that is in the loop for all of their health and wellness. And so I just think that the ground is shifting and the opportunity is so much greater.
And let’s be honest, there’s always gonna be people. Like I’m amazed that here in New York City, Parsley Health’s, you know, non-covered services fee is 1,500 bucks a year, and then we bill insurance. 1,500 bucks. There are people spending 60 grand a year for a concierge primary care service that they barely use that is straight down the Fireway primary care, and then those same people buy a $1,500 program at Parsley and bill everything in network because those services aren’t doing functional medicine.
And what it just says to me is that there’s, it is actually, it actually sort of blows my mind. But there’s this willingness and, and, you know, people want all sorts of different things. People want in- person care. Some conditions need in- person care. People want the kind of very high touch in- person relationship.
There’s always going to be people who wanna spend a certain amount on, like, more of a concierge, true concierge membership or experience, which we are clear at Parsley. We are at what I call concierge light, right? But we’re not the same as someone charging 20, $40,000 a year. That’s the different level of service, and there’s gonna be a market for that.
There always will. And so I just see it as not one, as not win or take all, but something where in this growing market, we can build lots of different services that will support all different types of patients. And then I also think on the insurance piece though, you’re right, like that, the whole idea that functional medicine has to be really expensive and that it doesn’t take insurance parsley is changing that.
We, uh, not only changing it, we have changed that. And that, while perhaps impactful in the very short run to certain practices, in the long run is only going to massively increase the demand and the awareness of functional medicine and increase the number of patients for everyone who’s in this field.
Yeah. I love that. Well, but … Okay. So you would sort of agree with my thesis though that, like, the, the edges, the relationship and the edges are, are sort of where the most opportunity is for a local practitioner, right, to do something there? Yeah. I think it’s the relationship. I think it’s the level of high touch level of service.
I know that in- person clinics, like, we have a full-body DEXA here in Parsley, New York. I know that a lot of in- person clinics, longevity and functional clinics offer a lot of sort of, not sort of, but, you know, offer a lot of services, whether it’s HBOT or IVs or plasmapheresis or other types of services.
Uh, I think that there’s also opportunity in specialization, right? If you’re really a go- to in women’s health or a certain type of condition set that you’re a rockstar at and are really known for that. And then if you’re a small concierge practice, you know, your target total patient population is probably relatively small too.
And just through word of mouth and delivering great care, you’ll fill your target patient group and you don’t care if somebody else like Parsley has 10,000 patients because you don’t want 10,000 patients, you want like 200. Good for you. I’m jealous. Well said. Yeah. Well, I guess one other thing I wanna share is, um, you know, one of the thing I, I’ve been thinking about a lot is the sort of gap in trust between, let’s say, the silent generation and Gen Z, right, where still the older folk sort of trust their doctor and do it all by the book and probably wouldn’t buy Parsley Health anyway because they’re fine with their current doctor or maybe they will.
No, they do. I mean, we have so many 60, 70, 80-year-olds using Parsley now. I’m, I’m sure they, but I, I also understand that, like, you know, for the younger people who don’t- Yes. … really have the same level of trust- Yeah. … they also have experienced like Roe and Hims and all of these things that are like so convenient, like impossibly convenient.
And I guess part of what I’ve been wanting to share with practitioners is that, you know, to compete in those younger markets, you have to be almost as convenient as those kind of companies, like the, the old functional medicine clinic of like all, you know, disorganized and all these labs and, you know, all different systems for everything, it’s not gonna fly with a younger user who’s used to a high technology experience.
That’s absolutely true. I do think that younger generations have different expectations of how they interact with their healthcare. They want it to be seamless, they want it to be easy, they want it to be online, they want it to be on demand. And services like HEMS HERS Row, diagnostic testing services on demand, even full body MRIs, right?
I want it, I get it. And people are willing to pay for that level of convenience and that level of responsiveness. And so I think it does change a lot about the way that practices are run. And you’ve done so much around practice technology and, you know, Parsley’s built a lot of its own software stack and we’re building a lot more with AI right now, which is just incredible what we’re able to build without that many engineers.
It’s just bananas. And, you know, we’ve also invested a lot behind that over the years. And yet, I think more and more there’s tools off the shelf that will also let a practice do that in a relatively seamless way, but I don’t think that you can hide from it because I do think that just the way we all use our iPhones or our smartphones in our day-to-day lives, and we’re used to having our wearable data in an app at our fingertips, you’re used to that in your life, you’re gonna want it in your medical care too, especially if it’s a specialized service like functional medicine.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, y- you know, your front door has always been quite appetizing for, for patients, right? A lower cost than, you know, other, other, uh, efforts and, you know, looks cool. Um, you know, you, but you’ve obviously taken, um, you, you, you’ve seen out in the industry the, the interest [00:28:00] in this sort of like labs first functional medicine right way of doing things from function and superpower and so forth.
And you mentioned the, the passive longevity labs. You know, w- what was it that helped you to decide that this was a good front door to, you know, to Parsley and, and what have you guys built in order to, uh, attract patients? Yeah. You know, we had been running this comprehensive functional lab panel through Quest and Labcorp for a decade.
And so when the Quest of the world finally opened their doors and said, “We’ll allow others to build on top of us,” which by the way, we had asked. They had said no to for a long time, uh, and then they changed that policy. And so what that did was it really opened the floodgates, as we’ve seen for companies, you know, across the board to build direct to consumer laboratory services on top of them.
And I think that’s awesome, by the way. I think it’s a huge step forward for the industry to make these tests more available. Quest also makes them available direct to consumer too, so you can buy direct from them. And what it does is allow people to get some data and get some intelligence on their body from a functional perspective as a stepping stone into care, right, for us.
And what we did is we didn’t just launch labs. We actually launched labs plus a lab review visit. And so the vast majority of people who buy our labs product don’t just buy the labs product. They buy the lab product and a 30-minute lab review visit where in addition to the lab results that we review, we review an intake when Parsley’s intake is quite specialized.
We’re looking at our symptom score, we’re looking at a lot of diet and lifestyle and clinical history. And so what they get is one of our amazing board certified, highly trained clinicians reviewing their labs, telling them what their labs mean and telling them what to do with that. And so even though that product, combined product of LabPlus visit is more expensive than the lab alone, it’s a better seller than the lab alone.
Because I think at this point, you can kind of get labs anywhere and there’s not really much … You know, differentiation or sort of moat around labs, which is I think a problem for the businesses selling labs, but it’s good for the consumer because you have Ryan Johnson like offering labs at cost, you know, across the board or you have companies like Whoop and Aura offering labs, which is great.
But I think it’s really for us, we see Parsley as the missing clinical layer in this functional health and longevity ecosystem. And coming in and offering this lab review visit and as part and parcel of the labs or in its own. So we actually offer this visit as a standalone and people can bring any lab.
So they can bring labs from any of the players you mentioned. Our labs doesn’t matter to us and we’ll do this review visit, um, and go over those labs with you and give people an action plan. Because what I see right now is whether it’s wearables or biomarkers or genetics tests or MRIs, people are a wash in data.
Like they’re swimming in data, but they don’t have answers and they don’t take action. And so they get the data, then they get the AI report, then they pop that into Claude or chat and get a review of that. Then they’re sort of still confused. Then they take this to their regular doctor who like shrugs or doesn’t have time or isn’t trained to deal with all of this and they just don’t, they don’t do anything from there.
I can’t tell you how many people bring me and show me their lab results. And they’re so proud of their biological age, whatever that says from whichever platform. But then they, from there, literally are like, ” I don’t do anything with this. I don’t know what it means. Can you tell me what it means? “Yeah. You know, what you’re really reinforcing there, and I just wanna maybe finish on is that it’s the human at the end of the day, right?
It’s you having that conversation with them and, and synthesizing it and believing enough in them to get them to move forward with something that they could’ve moved forward without the technology. It’s on the whoop. Some people will be able to do it from that, but I think the middle of the bell curve still craves that, that relationship.
And that’s why the patient-provider relationship is the center of functional medicine. It’s why I called the show the Functional Forum because here was a common language that had put the most important thing first. And I just wanna honor that in a world where you could have built something that like really divorced the human, you put the human at the center.
And I just wanna honor you for that. Thank you. It’s very easy to know. It’s way harder. It’s much harder to do this by the way. Yeah. Some ways I wish that I had gone the other way because my life would’ve been easier. But, um, you know, and, and all of these companies and, and Parsley are part of a broader solution, right?
I think this news for us being in network for 150 million people for me is really about Parsley, yes, as a business. It’s about a culmination moment for me personally. This is what I set out to do. And then it’s also about how do we march this kind of medicine straight into our healthcare system and begin to shift the healthcare system at large in a meaningful way.
And so my hope at the, is that, you know, our healthcare system that really only does recognize the true clinical medicine, recognizes providers, recognizes covered services, that this is sort of a wedge into that system that will reverberate across the system in interesting ways. And so let’s see. Yeah.
Let’s see. Last question. Are you hiring? Oh my gosh, always. Yeah. Do you need doctors? Do you need practitioners? Like ultimately, you know, I can imagine- Yes, always. Interim for so many practitioners is just to like be part of something that’s working. And I, I just- Yeah. You know, this- No, we are hiring MDs, DOs, NPs, PAs, um, functional RDs.
Uh, we go in waves of hiring. So sometimes you might connect with us and we might be all staffed up and other times we might be hiring. And so, um, we love to keep relationships strong and meet providers even if we’re not actively hiring right now. Okay. Uh, we also hire 1099s. Um, so we do hire and train our 1099s when, um, we don’t need or it makes sense to in addition to like our [00:34:00] W2s.
So we do both. Uh, most of our providers are W2, but s- and some are part-time, some are three quarters time, some are full-time. And then we also have a group of 1099ers, and it just really kind of rotates across. And sometimes the 1099ers join as W2s, like sometimes the W2s become 1099s, right? I love being able to provide the sort of flexibility here, and we have a lot of female providers, and I know as a woman who trained in medicine, I didn’t personally, you know, 15 years ago when I was in medical training, like imagine that I would have a job where I could work from home or that I would have flexible hours, I mean, as the, on the clinical side.
And so to be able to provide that for our providers, don’t get me wrong, people work hard here and we are busy, but there’s also a lot of support here and there’s a lot of flexibility, and it’s nice to be able to have created that environment for, for doctors and for NPs and PAs and other clinicians.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, just thinking back to the journey that I know that you took to get to Start Parsley, I see that you’re, you know, providing an incredible service to the rest of the community to really understand how to do this in a healthy way and, uh, so many of the resources that you built early on, which is really the chassis that everything else has sort of like, you know, come from is, was so critical.
Robin, such a pleasure, an honor to just, uh, witness your journey over the last decade plus. Uh, really appreciate our friendship. Really excited to pop up somewhere else in the world and see you again. And thank you for your pioneering work and thanks for being on the Evolution of Medicine Podcast. Oh my gosh.
So glad to see you and I appreciate you and our friendship over all these years. And thank you for having me on today and sharing this news and continuing to do what you do for the field. So more to come. More to come. This has been the Evolution of Medicine Podcast. We’ve been here with Dr. Robin Berzin.
Please share this episode with someone who you think needs to hear it, someone who’s looking for a job, someone who needs to take their practice to the next level, to be competitive locally, someone who, you know, you may have sat next to in a conference, um, who you wa- just wanna chat about this. I’m feeling compelled to set up some times to hold court with practitioners who wanna talk about this and what it means because I can see that this is a big moment in the evolution of medicine and a big moment for Parsi Health and a big moment for you and your practice.
So thanks so much for tuning in and we’ll see you next time. So that was the podcast. What an epic session. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Evolution of Medicine Podcast. We’ll be back again next week, and thanks so much for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.
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