This week on the podcast, James sits down with Nisha Chellam, MD, who discusses her journey from medical school to working in a hospital setting to transitioning into functional medicine. Nisha has her own practice that helps people reverse their type 2 diabetes and shares her insight on how to start building your functional medicine practice.
Highlights include:
- How to transition from an insurance-based to a cash-based practice
- How to connect with patients in a digital environments
- Helpful tools and resources for practitioners making the switch to functional medicine
- And so much more!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
James Maskell: Welcome to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, the place health professionals come to hear from innovators and agitators leading the charge. We cover the latest clinical breakthroughs in health technology, as well as practical tools to help you transform your practice and the health of your community. This podcast is brought to you by the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center, who provide a range of options to help you deliver successful, effective, functional, and integrative medicine. To find out more and to get started, go to goevomed.com/lmrc. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc.
James Maskell: Hello and welcome to the podcast. This week, we continue our marketing series and we’re talking to Dr. Nisha Chellam. She is in Michigan and she has built a really successful practice, helping people reverse their type 2 diabetes. In this interview, you’re going to hear about her journey from being a hospitalist via the VA and coming to practicing functional medicine, and then building a sustainable, successful practice. There’s a lot of great stuff in here just about the business model, about really thinking about how to create connection with patients in a digital environment. We talked about branding. We talked about really understanding the role of the challenge and what is possible in a challenge. So much good stuff in here for practitioners who are looking to make the shifts to a cash practice and what it takes to do that. Enjoy. So warm, welcome to the podcast, Dr. Nisha Chellam. Welcome, Doc.
Nisha Chellam: Thank you so much. This is so exciting to be on EvoMed.
James Maskell: I’m excited for you to be here too, just because we’ve been at this together. I feel like for a few years, and when I first started the Practice Accelerator back in 2016, you were one of the first class that came through. And over the last few years, we’ve had a number of people from the Practice Accelerator on the podcast, sharing their stories of wild success or otherwise. And I’m really excited to share today because I feel like it’s been a journey, but I feel like at this moment, you’re the happiest and most successful that I’ve seen. I’m super excited to share what you’ve learned with our audience.
Nisha Chellam: Yeah. Thank you. Yes. I’m excited to share my journey too.
James Maskell: Let’s get into the starting point. What made you decide that you should practice in this, in functional medicine and what were the early stages of the journey like?
Nisha Chellam: Yeah, sure. So coming from India, there were only two pathways. When you’re young, you either become a doctor or you get to be an engineer. We didn’t have any other choices. So it looks like I chose being a doctor, because I realized a lot of women who were physicians, were respected. They were revered in my country. And so that journey, of course, 14 years of schooling was all focused towards medicine. And the very first day of medical school I wanted to quit. I had never seen corpses before and walking into the dissection hall with the smell of formalin and trying to dissect into a dead body was not my vision of medicine. My vision of medicine was, I will see a patient, they’ll come in with a problem, I will know how to solve the problem, and they would be happy and I would be happy.
And so I was talked into continuing medical school. I hated every minute of it, but I couldn’t figure out why. I loved biology, but I couldn’t figure that out. And then circumstances had changed. I moved to the US and for the first time I really loved medicine. I worked in a downtown hospital. Wayne State University has three different hospitals. And what I loved about the practice of medicine is like, if somebody was sick, you could do any tests on them. Like I could order a CT scan, I could order an MRI, could order any blood tests. And that was the missing piece in India, if I had to order something, people have to have the money to do it. Whereas here, I could just order anything and everything. And I would get tests back in within hours, and we can make decisions.
And it was just phenomenal. In fact, I thought I wanted to be an intern one more year. I didn’t want to become a senior resident. I just loved the internship. I loved the floor work. But then again, you grow up and you graduate from there. And when I graduated residency my vision was, I’d love working in the hospital. So became a hospitalist. And I just loved my first six months till I realized, it was the same people coming through the revolving door. You treat them once, you…It’s almost like you’re saving their life. Their 20, 30 days in the hospital, they walk out the door the first time, the second time they will go out in a wheelchair and the third time in a gurney. And it was the same people. So again, I started spiraling a little out of control in terms of my passion to practice medicine, but I had not known anything else.
This was all I knew from when I was three, this is what I wanted to do. So by then I had my family. So one of the things to do is to focus more on raising my kids. And I remember the best place for a physician to have vacation is the VA. Nothing against the VA. I love it. But it’s a nine to five job. Weekends off, 11 days of public holidays, three weeks of paid vacation, a TSP, a pension plan. I was set for life. I was not about to leave that job at all. Except that five years into my work at the VA, I realized I’m seeing the same patients. I’m following so-called standard guidelines. A diabetic comes in, I put them on the four medications, your metformin, your statin, your blood thinner, your protection for your kidneys.
Those numbers get better. The sugar gets better. The cholesterol gets better. Their kidney function stays stable, but the patient is declining. They’re getting newer problems. Now they have heartburn. Then they have depression. And somehow this whole thing, their list of medications would get longer. And the side effects of the medications would get longer. And I would be treating theirside effects with yet another medication. And before I knew my patients had… From the 10 years I was at the VA, my patients numbers got better. I was bonused based on the fact that I brought their LDL down to 100, their hemoglobin A1C down to whatever number that they had so that I could to trigger my bonus. But I was miserable. Because patients would come to me complaining of fatigue, complaining of not being able to think properly, not being able to lose weight, continuing to gain weight.
And I was putting them on a low fat diet, asking them to exercise when they had no energy. And I just could not figure what was missing. But somewhere around this, around…I joined the VA in 2000. 2005, I had actually a patient who had very severe osteoporosis because he had a colostomy at the age of 25. I think they did a total colectomy for ulcerative colitis. He had very low vitamin D and he had severe osteoporosis and he refused to take the drug Fosamax for it. But he came back two years later with an increase in his bone density without any medication. And that was something that I was completely blown away by. And he showed me the supplements he took, the yoga he did and how he did strength training to build his bone mass up. And I’m like, “There’s a whole other world that I was completely unaware of.”
And I remember trying to find some information, but couldn’t necessarily land on what I wanted. I didn’t like the idea of replacing a medication with a supplement. So obviously after about five years of total misery, I decided to quit my dream job, the retirement job, and in 2010, I started my own practice. I started as under the same designers, idealmedicalpractices.org was an organization at that time, no staff. In fact, I had a hallway in the hospital. The president of the hospital really liked the fact that I had a micro practice. So I had one phone, which was an online phone, comes to my cell phone. And I had this computer through which people could do online appointments. I had a patient portal. This was way back in 2010 when people didn’t have patient portals, they didn’t have… I had UB Docs, which my faxing system, I was…I could just take my laptop and I had a practice.
I used to go to nursing homes, I was a director of a hospice, was director of assisted living. So I was going, running around all over in the hospital, working in the ER. And as my practice built, so did my misery. Because now we’re beginning to see a lot of sick people doing… I’m seeing them not only in my office, I’m seeing them in the hospital. I see them in the nursing home when they’re going through rehab, then I see them in the assisted living. They’re just declining and I am treating them. And none of this made sense. So as I always say this, it was like, I was watching porn at 11:00 PM. I would search for solutions like, what else can I do? And that’s when I think in 2014, I found you guys, the Functional Forum.
James Maskell: Yeah.
Nisha Chellam: And I remember watching all of those and I’m like, “Oh my God, there’s so much more that I could do.” And I joined FPC by the end of 2014.
James Maskell: Yeah. Interesting journey just to share a couple of things there like, I know for so many practitioners in this world, there’s one particular case that opens them up. And sometimes that case is their kid and sometimes it’s them. But it’s interesting that there was this one guy that seemed to buck the trend of what was possible. And once that idea is implanted into your head, the idea of just seeing people and watching them decline and giving the medication and not seeing them get better, it starts to itch at you, right?
Nisha Chellam: Yeah. It actually eats into your soul because there was nothing more important than raising my kids. My career, it was not even in my radar. It wasn’t like I wanted to become the CEO of something. It was just that I was very dissatisfied doing what I was doing. And I think a lot of physicians feel that way, but they continue to live that life. Because they don’t know there are other options out there. I just happened to know this option. Yeah. So yeah, in 2010—
James Maskell: 2014 now, you’re watching the Functional Forum, our first sponsor on the Functional Forum was FPC, and now you go there and what are your hopes and dreams with that? And how did it end up?
Nisha Chellam: So the biggest challenge there, I think the biggest shift I got from FPC is my mindset around taking cash, because I was still doing an insurance-based practice at that time. And I had actually gone to ifm.org, their initial, what do you call that? The five-day…
James Maskell: AFMCP?
Nisha Chellam: Yeah. Yeah. I did go for their five day thing. Maybe two years prior to that. And I cried at the end of the fifth day and I remember thinking, how am I going to actually implement this? And I think FPC gave me that way of implementing. At first they shifted my mindset, for shifting from insurance to cash based. That was a huge shift for me. It taught me about packages and I didn’t understand the packages for the whole year. I just did what they told me without thinking what it meant.
But after about a year I started, the roots started taking hold and I realized there were…I finally loved the practice of medicine, but I had to make it my own. So in the next year or so, I started doing, I had a hybrid practice. I had the insurance and when my patients were really very not doing very well, I would invite them to my dinner talk. And from there, they would become my patients on the wellness side. And I actually have graphs showing how their cholesterol, their blood pressure, their weight shifts. I’m the same doctor on both practices, but they would improve on the wellness side. So I think I did that for almost a year, but then again, I had that feeling of misery because I had close to seven staff. Four of them for the insurance company, for the insurance, for prior authorizations, consultations, referrals, and more and more with the meaningful use coming in, I was just torn between both my practices and I had to make a decision.
So in 2018, I just pulled the plug. I said, “I’m done with insurance. And I threw out Medicare in October of 2017 and all of my other insurances in April of 2018. 100% of my patients left me, like 100%. I had zero members in my practice. So for the next six months I funded my own practice. I was determined to make it work. I was in a hospital setting. I had a suite that cost me 3,200 overhead and no patients and three staff members. That was a very interesting time. And so I negotiated, I had two more years on the contract. I spoke to them and explained my situation that I’m no longer insurance-based. And so they let me off the contract. And I came to the different suite that I am in right now. And I started. This is like starting from scratch again.
I had dinner talks, I would do weekly dinner talks. It was very, very tiring because in the past I used to give them dinners. Then I stopped giving dinners. I just started giving education and connecting with people. And I would go to the local health food store. I would go to the library. Literally it was a hustle, because I needed people to know there was a different way. However, you have to remember in a dinner talk, you have that one hour and FPC had given me an outline on how to do that. People would come and say, “You just brushed overall, everything. You didn’t get into the depth of it.” So I started tweaking my dinner talk because I realized people who come to me, come to me with an underlying base knowledge, and they want to know more than what Google University teaches them.
So I started tweaking my dinner talks and I started expanding it to different things. Not just how stress, hormones and health, but really delving into diabetes, into insulin resistance separately. But having done that, that was going quite well and then slowly word of mouth started and my own patients started bringing in. So we started having like 30% referrals, around 70% I had to do the hustle and that ratio tipped over. And at some point it was 60 of referral. But still, I would say the beginning of this year was the best. December and January, I was barely there, March I was barely there, but we’ve made the most in terms of a practice and then COVID hit. So now the connection that I have with the community was completely gone. I couldn’t have dinner talks.
I couldn’t go to any of the places that I usually give talks, but I’ve always had Zoom. The other thing that happened, this is very interesting in, I’ve been trying to do an online platform for quite some time, but I had joined a leadership program in November of 2019. And one of the challenges they had given me is to actually build my online program in that 90 days that I was with them. So I had a push. That’s the only way I could graduate. So I built an online program over a weekend and in January I rolled it out. So when March came, I had a platform already. It was just so—
James Maskell: What was that program on? What were you teaching?
Nisha Chellam: So what I did is, when I looked at my patient population, the one thing that we 100% reversed and help them with was reducing inflammation and reversing insulin resistance. So I decided that’s going to be my niche because I do this so well, and particularly in the South Asian population. So I rolled an online program on resolving diabetes naturally. I ran a summit on it, I started doing free webinars on it because that is something I can shift people’s health. So that’s how I started. So when March came around, a lot of uncertainty, both for the practice and for people. Many got furloughed. Some people lost their jobs. So health insurance was a problem. A lot of my programs we could use HSA. And people didn’t want to spend their HSA because they were worried about COVID.
So what I did is the first three months I did free office hours. Free office hours, I would invite the local emergency room physicians to explain to people about COVID. I didn’t do anything pertaining to functional medicine, but after they would explain, people always wanted to know what supplements should I take? What should I do? And then we started building into lifestyle and all of those. And around that time, I think since all of us are at home and we’re all Zoomed out. We have enough of online programs to watch. The five day challenge came up for marketing and actually a good friend of mine from this leadership group actually invited me to that. And I said you know what, “I’ll just watch one more marketing. It’s going to be no big deal.” And I just casually went in for the first session and I was blown away.
It was almost two and a half hours. What blew me away is the guy was in his 20s and he gave so much information. I’ve been doing marketing not only from you, I’ve listened to such and a lot of other programs, anybody, what sort of program, I would go sign up. I’ve signed up so much. So this was just $97, but I remember him doing a two and a half hour, first day, an intro into this. And I was blown away because he gave a lot of value. Number two, he created a connection. And that was the one thing that I felt was missing when I’m not in the room with people. There’s a different energy. There’s a different connection when you’re giving a talk. So for me to create that connection, I felt like I was on Facebook.
I was just like a fly on the wall. I wasn’t even participating like the rest of the people in the group were, but I just felt that connection. And it just dawned on me, what I’m missing now is number one, a connection with my community, connection with patients. Number two, I also realized how he created a niche for himself. What he’s good at. So he used the word omnipresence, and I realized, I do a lot of it, but I’m not branding myself. So I wanted to create something where number one, I feel the biggest problem, functional medicine faces is we are dubbed under holistic and integrative. And neither are we holistic nor are we integrative. Functional medicine is a completely a different approach. I look at it as we’re looking at biochemistry and physiology of yourself rather than the pathology and pharmacology of the practice of treatment.
So how do I create that education point with patients? Because when they come to me, they’re saying, “Oh, I hear you treat things naturally. I’m taking all these supplements. Do you think you can look at this and tell me what I have to do?” And that’s not what I do. That’s not what any functional medical doctor does. So to create that educational platform, where, what is functional medicine? How are we different? That’s number one. Number two. The second thing that patients call and tell us is, “You know what? My doctor has done a lot of blood work, do you think I can just see you, I’ll bring all that blood work?” And not to be very insulting about it, but literally, the blood work a traditional medical system will approve and do is basically useless in rebuilding health, is great to identify disease. It doesn’t even identify dysfunction.
Your hemoglobin A1C is 5.5. They tell you is great. Your happy, your fasting blood sugar is 90, you’re gone. But if they haven’t measured your insulin, they haven’t checked your receptor resistance. They haven’t checked a lot of your gut health. We don’t know anything about your insulin or your metabolics. And what I realized is how do I tell that to patients? Those tests do not necessarily give us the information we’re looking for. So I wanted to incorporate that. And then the last one was to help them understand that functional medicine is not like for the rest of your life, you’re paying a doctor forever. It’s very finite. My work with the patient, when I do a program, 90 days or 120 days, we work with depending on your complexity. And after that, you just get rolled into a membership, if you still want to connect with me, it’s $150 a month.
You can’t get it any cheaper even with the deductibles, you can’t get it any cheaper to see a doctor. And you’ll see me three times a year. So that initial investment is where people hesitate. So I wanted to remove that barrier that, “Oh, I’m paying so much. What am I paying for?” So how do I explain that to them? This five day challenge, when I remember seeing Scott Oldford, I said, “I’m going to do the same thing, but I’m going to it trying to resolve the problems we face as a functional medical practice.” And that’s how I created the five day challenge too. And we call it the Sugar Drop Challenge. So I told them, I would do this free webinars every two weeks. I would have about 125 to 250 people sign on, 50 will show up, 35 will stay till the end.
And can I roll them into a low-cost, but give them everything that they need in that five days, but also read their lab work? When I say read, not give advice or give diagnosis or treatment plan, but showing them, “Your sodium is 138, that is not adequate.” That means I would look for the sugar and see, is the sugar a little high? How connecting the labs, showing them that the body is interconnected and then giving them an example of how a functional medical lab is completely different. That was mind blowing. And then we also did cooking classes, live cooking class. On Zoom, I would have everybody would send them the ingredient lesson, the recipe, we’ll all show up. I’ll have them open their camera so we can connect with each other. They’ll be in their kitchens, I’ll be in my kitchen, we will cook, but to show them how food can be healthy and tasty.
James Maskell: That’s awesome. Yeah. So last year we saw the value of the challenge too, to give people a five day experience to get something done. And we did it with group visits because we just figured, look, over five days you could plan and organize and start to execute towards the group visit. Because ultimately, there’s a lot of pieces that you have to pull together, but if you can give people a concentrated experience, it builds credibility and it gets action. What was it about the challenge structure? And how did you decide what to put in which day of the challenge and what was your hope in the journey that people would go through in those five days?
Nisha Chellam: Yeah. So number one, I wanted to show them a different way to look at their disease or dysfunction. For instance, insulin resistance is the body’s way of protecting you. It’s not a disease by itself. Diabetes is not a disease. It’s a symptom of trying…The body compensating for an underlying problem. So how do I get that across to people? Day one, I would go over, what are your modifiable risk factors? What are your risk factors that you cannot modify? That’s giving them the foundation of what insulin resistance actually means. Day two, is to help them understand how the body’s interconnected. It’s not like, I don’t have any other problems. I just have diabetes. No, you have more than just diabetes because in metabolic syndrome, which we, as doctors tend to be just like accountants. Income, revenue, we use all these terms in accounting and same thing as doctors, we say metabolic syndrome, we call it pre-diabetes.
We call it insulin resistance. So people think these are all different things. They’re not different. They are almost the same. And I needed to show them, how does your blood sugar affect your triglycerides? How does it affect your LDL? How does that affect really how…Your weight, how does it affect your gut health? So I needed to show them. So the day two I showed the interconnection and day three was a live video where I would actually take their labs. And they would submit their labs at the beginning of the challenge and I’ll make slides out of them with no patient identifiers and just educate them on the numbers. And day four was the cooking, from all of that, how do we…What are the things that you can do to reduce your insulin resistance?
And day five I would tie it all together. What did we learn in day one? What did we learn in day two? What are your takeaway points on day three and day four. Now on day three, when I do the blood work, I actually make an offer for them to get their blood work done through our practice. And I would do it at like, whatever’s my price. I gave them a discount, because I think that’s what people want. People want to know, how can you tell me what is wrong with me? Because my doctors tell me everything is fine, but I don’t feel good. I can’t seem to lose this weight. I can show them their leptin resistance. I can show them that they have low adiponectin. So things that regular medicine does not look for, we do that for them.
James Maskell: So I know you said you had focused on South Indian population, was there a South Indian focus to the challenge or was it for anyone?
Nisha Chellam: So, no, not really. So a lot of my South Indians come through referral, but it was more on insulin resistance.
James Maskell: Okay.
Nisha Chellam: And yes, but when I show cooking, a lot of it is about herbs and spices. How do you use herb and spices to flavor instead of throwing in fat and meat into it? It’s just so much.
James Maskell: So you have your challenge halfway through, you do that, you do the lab testing, you make them an offer to come in. I’d imagine at the end of it, you have a sort of another offer. What did you see that the challenge did to warm up patients that maybe other marketing had not done?
Nisha Chellam: Yeah. It was a webinar, but they would be able to put Q and A and the Chat Box. And as I’m doing this, I’ll ask them, what is your takeaway point from this? What did you get out of this? Does this make sense? And it would open up. I could see that it clicked, “Oh my God, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that.” They didn’t realize what triglycerides meant. It was not just beer and carbohydrates. And they would not know oxidized LDL. So it just opened. And because their blood work was also in there and each one recognize their own blood work, they realized in that same blood work, I read it differently than their doctor. I could look in a normal CBC and say, “Hey, your platelets are 360. That is way too high. Even though it’s in the normal range, it’s the higher end of normal.”
So you could see that light bulbs go off and just the comments that they were making. So I realized that they got it, that functional medical approach, the deep dive in getting to the root cause means a lot more than just diet and exercise.
James Maskell: Beautiful. I love that. I love the idea there because ultimately it’s like an education experience, but you have enough of a day to day experience with them where you can start to build some momentum for them. And then it’s pretty easy for them to say, “Look, I trust this person and take whatever offer there is to come into the practice.” And I like the way you’re leading people along because ultimately I think, if you look back now, the early days of selling those packages with FPC, it’s like a big jump to get someone to give you five grand who doesn’t know who you are. Especially during COVID and I think, but there’s good principals there which is, okay, people need to commit to their health, they’re going to commit at the beginning, then they can follow through without having to pay every time.
I think a lot of patients come out of care before they actually reach their true health because of financial issues. So I think all of those things were right, but I also feel like we really have to think through how do we bring people through, if we’re going to operate inside the cash model, we have to think about how we can add value, bring people through, give them some starting points and answer their questions. So I really love the way that you are thinking about it. I guess the question I have for you is obviously there’s a lot of practitioners listening to this with various amounts of technological skill, experience. You’ve obviously invested a lot in the last 10 years to get yourself to a point where you are technically capable enough to execute at this level. Do you think that this is something that your average functional medicine doctor can do or should do?
Nisha Chellam: Yeah, absolutely. Because I was average at one time. I started with nothing. One of the things I would say is have a signature talk because when we meet as a group, everybody has a point of view, put it in as a signature talk for yourself. It could be a 15-minute talk, a 20-minute talk. I’ve done 15-minute talks. There what are your main points? Do a signature talk and start doing it to your own patients. A lot of physicians have their own insurance-based practice, start talking to them. And that’s what I did with my patients. It’s my own patients I invited to the very first talk. There was a lot of…And yes, you will be investing money, but maybe you don’t, you could just have them bring a brown bag lunch and give your time. So I think getting feedback from your own patients, see how they understand what you’re saying and keep working on that signature talk till it becomes your own.
I think that’s where you have to begin. You have to begin by…I think that one thing that’ll kill functional medicine is obscurity. If you’re obscure and no one knows, and you’re waiting for… because in traditional medicine, insurance markets for you. They’ll say this person takes Blue Cross Blue Shield or this person takes your HMO. And so the marketing is built into that, but once you’re trying to do something different, you have to market for yourself. So what is your comfort level? Can you talk to small groups of people whom you know already and who already trust you? I think the trust is a huge factor and that’s what the five-day challenge did. And that’s what all of these years that I’ve been putting out content. I will say this, my first video, I shot it 122 times before I published it.
James Maskell: Wow
Nisha Chellam: And it was only a five-minute video.
James Maskell: Yeah. Well look, I mean, that’s part of the confirm. I remember when you, in the Accelerator, in those early days, there was a video challenge and everyone was like challenging themselves to show and shoot, record videos, because ultimately it’s a big first step, but once you realize that you can record a video once and then you can send to every patient, potential fate patient and future patient to it so that they come to know, like, and trust you before they come to the practice, it just changes the game because then you’re realizing you don’t have to do and say the same thing over and over again.
So I really appreciate you sharing that because ultimately what we’ve had to do in the Accelerator is try and get people over the hump, towards trying new things, executing and learning as you go. Because once you, it sounds like, one of the things that FPC really gave you was that change in mindset towards, okay, you’re going to have to act like an entrepreneur, but ultimately, here you are six years later. And I feel like in your flow as a doctor, it’s all yours, it’s not someone else’s. And you’re helping people in Michigan reverse their diabetes and that’s it.
Nisha Chellam: Absolutely. It is a journey, I agree, but you got to start somewhere and I would say, have a mentor. I don’t know why people try to do it on their own. And I think find a mentor within the community. I’m sure somebody is willing to mentor you and just help you build to the next level. Because I think, right now I’m at the point where I don’t think I would be able to do groups. I would need a one-on-one mentor. And I do have a life coach who walks me through my down days. Always have a coach or a mentor. They are two different things. But start with a mentor and then also have a coach so that you can walk through this. Because it’s not easy. It hasn’t been easy.
And even with COVID, I think month of fall, August, we were…I thought I was going to have to shut down. So I negotiated my rent with my current landlord and brought down my overheads. So there are certain things you just have to, it’s a hustle, but as long as you will like it and you enjoy it because ultimately I get to do medicine the way I think it should be done. I’m not saying this is the right way, but this is how, because I want results and I will do whatever it takes to get results for my patients. And I have the freedom to do it. That’s what this is about.
James Maskell: Yeah. I love that. Well, look, Nisha, it’s been awesome to watch your journey and just in the last six months, just seeing you inside the Practice Accelerator group, just shining, and really, I think just stepping into you as the physician that I think you always knew you could be and are now, and it’s really exciting to see. And I know that this is not the end, but really the beginning of the next 20 years. And as we all work together to shift the paradigm in healthcare, I’m just so excited to see so many examples now of doctors shining their light, doing it right. And leading the path for everyone else, because ultimately it’s a scary path for doctors.
Some doctors are following their path towards having a cash business and learning the things that you’ve had to learn to fill that business and grow it. And some doctors are forging new and different paths to open up different areas. So I’m just excited to see that and to witness it and to have you here on the Evolution of Medicine podcast to like, I guess almost, it’s like an end of one chapter and it’s the beginning of a next, so congratulations. And thank you so much for participating. Anything else you want to share with the practitioner community?
Nisha Chellam: Yeah, absolutely. I would say this. If I hadn’t found you guys, I don’t know, I probably would have still been searching, so thank you so much for actually creating that platform. You brought together so many [inaudible 00:37:59] then you continue to do that. I know I don’t do functional forum anymore because it’s for whatever reasons it didn’t work very well in Michigan for me at this point in time, I have to just re figure that out. But I will say, the amount of support that you guys had given, and Gabe was really, closely following up. I would call him and talk to him, amazing support. The initial years when I was a novice and I was very confused about this whole process, it was difficult for me to ask money. It was difficult for me to put programs together, but right now I feel like if I didn’t have you guys and I didn’t…And I’m so glad I continued to stay with the group because I think I was grandfathered in, because I was one of the first few people who joined when you rolled out the programs.
I’m very grateful for that. I still show up on some of the webinars. I think, what you offer and the fact that it evolves to newer things like every time a new practitioner brings in something you immediately put it out to the community. I think that is very useful. So if someone is listening or has heard of EvoMed, I think this is a great place for people to get started if they’re just starting. I really truly believe that.
James Maskell: Beautiful. Well, thank you for saying that and thank you for your work and also your participation and support in the group. It’s really exciting to see doctors really, stepping up. So this has been the Evolution of Medicine podcast. We’ve been here with Dr. Nisha Chellam. If you want to follow along with anything that she’s doing, she’s very visible online, and you can check out the challenge and you can check out the details of what she’s created. I think so many great points in here that are probably worth listening to again, with regards to business model and marketing strategy, and particularly creating a challenge as a way to build that connection. Thanks so much for being part of the Evolution of Medicine podcast. I’m your host, James Maskell and we’ll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the evolution of medicine podcast. Please share this with colleagues who need to hear it. Thanks so much to our sponsors, the Lifestyle Matrix Resource Center. This podcast is really possible because of them. Please visit goevomed.com/lmrc to find out more about their clinical tools like the group visit toolkit. That’s goevomed.com/lmrc. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you next time.
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