029: Future-Proofing Your Practice With Tom Blue

“Don't mistake the opportunity for Long COVID with the frustration of dealing with the fast moving world of acute COVID. This is a big opportunity, not only to grow your practice, but quite frankly, to put a massive stake into the ground around the power of root cause medicine and an opportunity to build an evidence base that I think is of huge significance for the whole field,” shares Tom Blue, healthcare entrepreneur.

Functional medicine practitioners face two main challenges when growing their practices. One, there is a large upfront time investment required for learning. Second, most insurance providers will not work with functional medicine practices and the burden of cost then falls on the patients, many of whom will not want to invest more into their healthcare.

So how do you navigate these challenges and future proof your practice?

In this episode, Tom discusses the importance of niching down your outreach to focus on those patients whose needs are not being met by the traditional healthcare system, like those with autoimmune conditions and other chronic pain conditions. He explains that Long-Covid is a key niche to target, because it is underserved and symptoms-based management alone is not sustainable. 

He also talks about ways to further future-proof your practice by incorporating health trackers like the Aura Ring and utilizing ChatGPT for creating educational materials. 

 

Quotes

• “We have essentially handed over control of curating our health care to a payer that only seldom has our interests at heart. So think about what your car or your house would look like, if the only things you did to take care of it were covered by Geico. If you think about the declining state of the American human condition, from a health standpoint, I think a lot of it has to do with this very thing. It's like preventive care, that root cause resolution of things. These are more value judgments than things that pose the risk of financial ruin. So they're not really in the domain of what insurance should cover anyway. But unfortunately, most consumers have yet to wade into that reality.” (8:29-9:10 | Tom) 
• “If you're wanting to solve pains, focus on conditions that are painful and where the healthcare system leaves people wanting more.” (15:41-15:48 | Tom)
• “There's this astonishingly large population of people that a year ago, two years ago, were essentially the picture of health and function. And all of a sudden, they can't walk around the block without being completely exhausted.” (16:50-17:05 | Tom)
• “Unlike a lot of chronic conditions that, like the frog in the pot of boiling water, progress so slowly you're constantly recalibrating what normal is and you forget how good you used to feel, Long COVID is the opposite of that.” (17:23-17:35 | Tom) 
• “The only way we have to quantify health historically has been our bathroom scale, which is generally a bad news generator. Now that we have tools like an Aura Ring, you've got this high resolution continuous picture of your health in many different dimensions. And there’s good news to be found in it.” (26:36-26:57 | Tom)
• “Don't mistake the opportunity for Long COVID with the frustration of dealing with the fast moving world of acute COVID. This is a big opportunity, not only to grow your practice, but quite frankly, to put a massive stake into the ground around the power of root cause medicine and an opportunity to build an evidence base that I think is of huge significance for the whole field.” (29:19-29:43 | Tom)

 

Links

 

Connect with Tom Blue:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomblue/

 

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