Why Your Functional Medicine Practice Needs a Training Program

Imagine you are a physician who opens a Functional Medicine clinic.

Because the Functional Medicine paradigm generally delivers a higher quality of healthcare, your panel quickly fills up. Now you have a waitlist. But you know this is not ideal and you want to take your practice to the next level. So you hire another provider. The new provider is qualified, has an energetic personality, and seems like a good fit.

But here's the problem... how do you know what the other provider is doing? Conventional medicine is relatively algorithmic, so there is not a lot of ambiguity regarding how to handle chronic diseases. However, in Functional Medicine, there is a wide array of opinions and approaches to treatment. What if the other provider is giving nutritional advice that contradicts your advice? What if they are ordering different labs, interpreting the labs in a different way, or using different treatment protocols? 

At scale, this will ultimately become a huge problem. You cannot have a practice that operates like this. Providers can certainly have their own style and emphasis, but there has to be some degree of consistency regarding the underlying principles of the practice. If a patient of yours sees the covering provider, you want that patient to have a relatively consistent experience. Consistency of patient experience across providers will strengthen the overall quality of care that your practice delivers. 

It was from this problem that the PatriotDirect Functional Medicine Training program was born. We created the training program for our clinic and the results were exactly what we wanted: consistent, high-quality patient care amongst all providers. 

It was through this process that we realized that this problem was not unique to our practice, it is a ubiquitous problem throughout all multi-provider Functional Medicine practices. We also understand that healthcare providers may not have time to write a comprehensive training manual with thousands of references to the medical literature that fully articulate and provide scientific evidence for your system. Therefore, we offer the solution of simply licensing ours. Just have each provider go through the training program. We take care of providing the online material, written and oral assessments, and verification that the provider meets our standards for comprehension of the Functional Medicine system.

If you are interested in discussing how our training program would bring value to your multi-provider Functional Medicine practice, feel free to contact us at [email protected].