The Transparent Podcast
The Transparent Podcast
Dr. Lynn Rapsilber - Transforming Healthcare Through Nurse Practitioner Entrepreneurs
The healthcare system is broken, but nurse practitioners might be the solution we've been waiting for. Dr. Lynn Rapsilber, co-founder and CEO of the National Nurse Practitioner Entrepreneur Network (NNPEN), joins us to explore how nurse practitioners build sustainable, patient-centered practices that could transform healthcare delivery.
Ready to transform healthcare from the ground up? Visit www.nnpen.org to learn about their Business Basics Accelerator course and discover resources for healthcare entrepreneurs committed to putting patients first.
Hi, my name is Nick Ford and I am the host of the Transparent Podcast, where we believe in bringing transparency to the world of small business, and this week I am joined by a guest, and her name is Lynn Lynn. I'll let you introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Dr Lynn Rapsilber. I'm a nurse practitioner. I am the co-founder and CEO of the National Nurse Practitioner Entrepreneur Network. Our mission is to elevate the nursing model of care by transforming healthcare delivery through sustainable practices that are financially stable to help change healthcare delivery.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I know you're busy, involved in several different things. I can't wait to talk more about that. I founded Transparent Staffing back in 2021. And so we focus on bringing transparency to the staffing industry in the market and felt like the best way to have long-term success in recruitment, which is essentially matchmaking we're trying to match the best possible candidate for an organization and vice versa is transparency Be as open and honest about the position in the company and the culture and is honest with clients about the candidate and why we think they're a good fit. And that's had a lot of success for us.
Speaker 1:As far as permanent placement recruiting, which we're focused in and so, similar to the theme of my business the podcast I was inspired to start to bring transparency to the world of small business and love to talk with entrepreneurs about how they got into entrepreneurship, what inspired them and just talking about business in general. And so you know one of the things for me I had kind of a luxury when I started transparent staffing. I got to start it as a side business, so I had a full-time job in employee benefits actually, and they didn't see recruiting as a competitor, so it was a good opportunity to connect with companies to help them with recruiting and then kind of talk to them about benefits as well, and then obviously was able to move it to a full-time business. But how does that work for nurses? Because I would imagine I've worked in healthcare for a while and sometimes there could be non-competes or things like that. So is that a possibility with nurses to start as a side business, their own practice, or is it something they should jump all into typically?
Speaker 2:That's a great question and I would say most of the NPs that want to start a practice will do it as a side hustle and build it up and then quit their day job once they're more stable. In that process it takes a long time to actually get a business up and running.
Speaker 2:So I do tell people what's your timeline? I'm wanting to get this business started and if they say, oh you know, next month I'm going well, the timeline is probably not going to happen. Especially if you're going to take insurance, it can take up to six months to get credentialed with the insurance company. So planning and having a good plan in place and developing your business plan is probably the first place. I tell people to start when they're thinking about business, because if you put it on paper and you start building it, it really starts to make sense for you. But many people are starting. They have a passion about something or see a need in the community, a problem they want to solve. That's usually what triggers their wanting to start a practice usually what triggers their wanting to start a practice. And then they may be in the medical model, which we know is transaction-based.
Speaker 2:You see a patient, you order a treatment or a test and then the patient goes in that 15-minute window. There's not a lot you can accomplish and when nurse practitioners see patients, we look at the whole person. So we have to take into account. I'm going to prescribe this med, but can you afford it? Do you have any other medications that might be contrary to it. Do you have food in the house? Do you have transportation that you can get to the pharmacy to get your medication? All of those things factor into it. Is it something that requires a prior authorization, which means you're not going to get it soon? It's going to take a while for us to do that, so there's a lot of nuances that go into our visits that not necessarily are part of a transaction. We tend to put the patient at the forefront and then we work in partnership with the patient to get them to their optimum level of wellness, whatever that might be.
Speaker 1:Right. So yeah, with with me starting my business, um, it was a service-based business and so I didn't have to have a brick and mortar location. There's certain things that made it, uh, where I didn't have so much overhead that I had to invest in before I started. Um, you know, helping clients. So, as far as with nurse practitioners, I imagine that's a little bit more challenging. I would think that there's more overhead, there's more hoops to jump through to get a business started from the ground up with a nursing practice, right?
Speaker 2:One thing that's unique with nurse practitioners and it keeps the cost lower is that we tend to go where the patients are, so we may go to their home. We may go to daycares, we may go to churches, we may go to employers, we may go to rehab centers, we may go to nursing homes, so we might go where the patients are, versus having the patients come to us their homes, you know. So there's a lot of opportunity to start a business with low startup costs when you're looking at it that way. Plus, the advent of telehealth has been extremely valuable as well, because people don't have to leave their home to actually have a visit. They just need to have internet access and bandwidth in order to do that. So that's really changed, and that was part of COVID. That really revolutionized our ability to have access to patients in a more timely fashion.
Speaker 2:But there's barriers that we have to practice that we have to overcome as well. There are some states that require collaboration with a physician before you can. You know, as a condition of practice, there might be a joint board between the Board of Nursing and the Board of Medicine. There might be some prescribing rules. So there are barriers like that that nurse practitioners who want to be entrepreneurs have to go over and find solutions for that. So we've tried to at NNPEN provide collaborating physicians and provide some help and support to reduce some of those barriers to practice. So we're really cognizant of some of the challenges. There are some states that, like Michigan, a nurse practitioner cannot own a business, only a physician can. So they have to find somebody. Yeah, so there's lots of challenges but nurse practitioners are very resilient. I mean we will try to make something happen and we'll be.
Speaker 2:I think we love a challenge because we like to problem solve. So the more difficult sometimes a process is, the more challenging it is for an NP, the more sometimes they get energized by that too. But again, when you're not having business education, you don't know what your you know fixed costs are and what, how you can forecast and how do you set your prices and how, what your payer mix look like. There's a lot of questions that we don't get any education about that. So we curated a business accelerator course 12 weeks online that an MP can take, where they get content during the week, asynchronous, that they do at their own time, and then we meet on Zoom as a cohort. So all the folks that are taking that particular course meet and they could be all across the country creating all these unique type of practices, and it provides some support, it gives them confidence, they support each other and it really becomes a community and I think that that's really important because a lot of practice owners practice in isolation and you really need that community support.
Speaker 1:I love that. It can be very. You know, I was a single operator for years and I know there's a whole lot another level of challenges, I guess you could say, with practicing medicine. But when you're a solo entrepreneur or running a private practice, I imagine just like for me you can become very siloed and it's good to be able to, um, bounce ideas off of other.
Speaker 1:You know practitioners, um, both, I'm sure, like medically consulting, um, you know on cases, but also on how to run a business. And and uh, you know that that's one of the things I do talk about fairly regularly with all the doctors or nurse practitioners or therapists that have their own practices that they weren't trained to run a business and they're, they're trained how to treat patients, and so I love that you have a network to try to help with that. Because I wonder, with COVID there was such a shortage and a lot of that was staffing shortages for hospitals and things like that, and I know a lot of clinicians in general, like RNs, nurse practitioners, a lot left the industry completely. Do you think that would have been different if they were in their own practice, rather than having to take on the massive workload of a staffing shortage during COVID?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I do think the telehealth aspect really opened more doors for entrepreneurs to start a business with really low startup costs. That's another challenge that nurse practitioners have is we don't have access to ready capital like physicians do. They can go into any bank and get a lot of money to start a business. We're nurse practitioners. We don't have a great track record in the sense that nobody knows who we are, what we're doing out there, and we haven't done a good job of articulating our message about that either and our economic value that we bring. So all those factors.
Speaker 2:they're starting to change. What we're finding is small community banks are more likely to lend to nurse practitioner practices because they're in the community and they have community projects that they need to have done and the nurse practitioner could work with that community bank to meet those demands, maybe hosting a blood pressure screening clinic, for example, or you know some other area in healthcare that they can support each other. So those tend to be the places I would suggest MPs go to look for capital is your community banks, because they tend to are vested in the community just like they are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love community banks and you can also get a lot of the best rates on other things too. As far as like your mortgage or car loan or things like that. They typically have really good options, I found, and I use a community bank for my business as well, so definitely would agree there. So you know, one of the challenges with the healthcare industry is that it's constantly changing, and one of the things that I hear you know pretty often is the difficulty of handling billing and insurance. And so how does that? I know there's options to kind of outsource that so that practitioners can use a company to handle their billing for them, or they can obviously hire someone to handle billing, but do you see that as something that you kind of have to educate on in the industry?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and again, I think it's not our fault that we didn't get this business training. I think it's not our fault that we didn't get this training, and I think the other interesting thing is since COVID our stock has gone up in the communities. Plus, there's a shortage of primary care physicians and psych mental health providers and we're filling those gaps in the communities that we serve, the nurse practitioner profession has grown exponentially. We're now at 431,000 nurse practitioners, up from 385,000 a year ago.
Speaker 2:So we're growing and so the less barriers that we have, the more we can be out there in the communities, the more we can have seats at the table where decisions are made. That's going to help us, overall, improve health care. And I do think that we have to pay attention to bad actors that are out there. There's a lot of folks who don't understand what an NP is. They don't understand the nursing model and that's different from the medical model. They don't employ nurse practitioners that have any business experience. They don't have them on their advisory board or they don't even consult with them. So that sets somebody up for failure because they're not going to get the kind of attention that they need in order to be successful as a business owner.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of companies out there that will create many medical practices for nurse practitioners. But if you don't know the right questions to ask, like what I just said, you may end up, you know, being in a situation that had you known you probably wouldn't have signed up with them, and a lot of these entities that will help you start up your business will say hey, you know, we know you do best by seeing your patients. Just see your patients and we'll take care of the business. How well do you think that's going to go over? Because if that MP has no idea how much revenue they're bringing in and what percentage they should be, you know these companies should be taking, they could lose a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:And going back to the billing piece, you have to get credentialed. So again, you want credentialers that understand the nursing model of care and how it differentiates, and you also want to have a good understanding of the billing and coding side of things what CPT and ICD codes to use, because you want to make sure that you're maximizing your revenue stream. So nurse practitioners spend more time with their patients, so you may want to code by time. There are other testing and forms and surveys that we can do with our patients that will pay a little bit extra. There's care that we can deliver in between visits that we can bill for. So there's a lot of ways that you can utilize the billing and coding system differently than if you were in the medical model to help pay the bills.
Speaker 2:But I have to tell you we're at a disadvantage because we get 85% of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. Physicians get 100 percent. So we're already starting off in a deficit and trying to provide care and we know that the current reimbursement rates are not keeping up with inflation. So I have to pay the same amount for Band-Aids as physician practices do. That's the reality of it. So it becomes more of a challenge. So we're trying to opt for practices where you can go out into the communities and serve the patients and have that low overhead, at least to start out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that seems like a great option. And then, you know, I think COVID really catalyzed the telehealth model and I think that that's. You know, I've focused a lot in behavioral health and there's this massive shortage, and so that allowed, you know, for rural communities to be able to be treated and for people who couldn't access it to, you know, get health care, and you know, I think that there's there's some things that obviously, I think are better suited for an in-person visit, but there's a lot that can be treated via telehealth if it's done well. And so, you know, is there challenges with that, as far as, like, making sure that the telehealth system that's being used is HIPAA compliant and those kinds of things? Is that something you'll educate on?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely. Yes, there are some requirements for telehealth. The nurse practitioner needs to be licensed in the state where the patient is. So I'm licensed in Connecticut. Okay, patients of ours go down south for the winter so I can't do a telehealth visit for a patient that might be in Florida, north Carolina, south Carolina, because I'm not licensed in that state, so that telehealth visit cannot happen. So these are unless you get licensed. So it gets a little dicey because if you have to be licensed in all 50 states it could be, you know, really cost prohibitive. They're talking a bit about maybe doing a telehealth licensure, really taking away those state borders when it comes to doing telehealth.
Speaker 2:I haven't heard more about that recently but, you know, we have to be licensed in every single state to provide that telehealth visits to those patients in those states. So again, if you're going to do a telehealth visit, you have to start thinking about what states you want to actually work in and if you need a collaborative agreement, that's going to be additional costs. So, yeah, it could add up pretty quick if you don't do your homework.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it can be very expensive. I'm assuming the interstate licensure compact helps some with that. Does that apply to nurse practitioners or does it not?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great question. So yeah, so we have to be licensed as RNs and we have to be licensed as APRNs, so there are many states that are RN compacts, but the APRN compact.
Speaker 2:It has been approved in a few states. The problem with the APRN Compact is there's no representation on the board of an APRN, so you don't have anybody with that expertise. You know making the rules. There's issues regarding prescriptive authority, because that varies by state, and in Connecticut in particular we have a program called Haven that's funded by nurse licensure monies and that goes to help impaired providers be able to get the help they need without jeopardizing their license. So that's the and it's all confidential.
Speaker 2:It's all confidential, so that could be a problem. And again, if one state has this and others don't, you know, can you still do business in the other states, you know. So there's a lot of still unanswered questions that really need to be ferreted out before the APRN compact actually gets done. But the RN compact I think in a lot of states has gone through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I recently started working with a client, and they have a telehealth need in Washington state, and so they obviously need someone who's licensed in Washington. But the health system that they're partnering with also requires that the clinician has to be in Washington, so they can't just have the license that they'll be physically in the state because, for some reason, um, um, which that was the first.
Speaker 1:I hadn't really heard that, but it is. It is what it is. That's the requirement. So, and for those who are listening, who don't know what we're talking about with the interstate licensure compact, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but basically it's, it's a, it's a group of states who have agreed that if you have a state, a license one state, they'll accept the requirements of the other states, so someone could apply and have a much easier process to get licensed in the states that are within that compact. Is that basically right?
Speaker 2:It is, and again, I think the APRN. There was an additional time to practice requirement that some states have never had, a transition to practice requirement of certain hours, so that's another area that needs to be ferreted out. So, yes, it is a conglomerate of states that will band together to try to have one license. In theory it's great, but how do you you know who gets the licensing dollars and how does that distribute it? And what does you know? A claim against the Board of Nursing in one state? How does that impact their ability to practice in the other states? That might be in the compact. So there's a lot of still gray when it comes to putting that together, but stay tuned.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Well, you know there's those challenges in scaling every kind of business with nurse practitioners. How do you handle scaling a business and remaining clinically focused? Because I love working with companies who are clinically owned, where the telehealth client I mentioned is owned by a child and adolescent psychiatrist. And then I work with another group that's a behavioral health group that's owned by a licensed clinical social worker and she still sees patients. So how do you scale while staying focused, not just becoming bogged down by the business and the dollars like a lot of health systems do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question and I think, again, understanding your financial dashboard of your practice can be very helpful in looking at when do you? Because a lot of NPs start as a solopreneur. They're doing everything. They're answering the phones, they're scheduling the patients, they're doing the billing. You know all of that gets done by one person and at some point you have to say you know, maybe I should have somebody doing my billing, maybe I should have somebody doing my scheduling and then figuring out how you can bring those people in.
Speaker 2:Most NP practice owners practices are small by design because they want to keep them smaller. They don't want to have them grow. But then there are circumstances that all of a sudden, these practice owners might have rapid growth. So they have to be prepared either way to stay small. And how are they going to stay that way versus how are you going to ramp up and grow your business? Maybe creating franchise opportunities, for example, or expanding to several different offices within your geographic area, whatever that looks like, or maybe you're going to do different service lines. I mean, that's another way to expand your business as well. And these are all things that we can help by talking it out with our NP entrepreneurs to see what they're interested in. We're also working on an advanced business course, which will tackle some of these higher functioning issues that happen as you're trying to scale and grow your business awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's great. I love that you're helping nurse practitioners be able to learn the business side and learn how to scale and do it, do it in a smart way, and so I applaud you for that. I I think that, uh, more people should go into small business in general, but especially on the clinical side. I think it would, it would help all our communities to have more people that were able to do go into business for themselves, uh, treating patients, and so you know, when you look at nurses, nurse practitioners that have gone into their own business um, how, how, what is, I guess, separated? The people who have done really well with it, that have, um been able to not necessarily to scale, but just be able to run a successful business and be profitable.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of it is having a better understanding of the foundations that you need in order to monitor your business, understanding who you should partner with to help your business grow or to provide service lines, making sure that you're doing things that are ethical and legal and you know out of the radar of illegal activity. There's a lot of people out there who will teach you how to do. You know, start up a practice or do a service line, and you have to be the one to ask a lot of questions Is this something that there's evidence-based to support it? A lot of nurse practitioners are doing cash pay practices like aesthetics and weight management, for example, and IV therapy seems to be another big one.
Speaker 1:You know IV hydration I've seen that too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so the thing is it's great and what we try to do is encourage people to do those as side hustles, but really invest in the Medicare, medicaid population, because those are the ones that really need care and we can impact their trajectory of their health. But you can also and that's not going to pay the bills, obviously so adding on these additional service lines can certainly enhance your revenue stream. The IV hydration in particularly is bothersome because there is no evidence to support that giving anybody a bag of fluids is going to be beneficial. So if you get called into court and you have to prove, why did you give this kid who was, you know, maybe drinking too much, and you're going to provide that hydration clinic next to the college campus so that they can go to their classes on Monday? And this kid has underlying heart condition that you didn't know about and you put them into heart failure.
Speaker 2:You know how do you address that. I mean, some things are unexpected, but you know. But if you don't and I always tell my nurse practitioners, don't jump into something because of how lucrative it may seem there's probably a reason if it sounds too good to be true, why and a lot of companies are looking to utilize our prescriptive authority or our licensure and maybe to order particular tests or braces or things like that. If you haven't examined that patient and you haven't determined medical necessity for that test or equipment, you shouldn't be writing that order.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of fraud and abuse out there, especially with durable medical equipment like braces, that you always hear people getting in trouble for that, because they're hiring providers to sign these orders and they're not examining the patients. And then these poor elderly people are taken advantage of with their Medicaid or Medicare numbers and it's to benefit these durable medical equipment companies. And knowing what can get you into trouble is also very important because you don't want to lose your ability to be a provider of care because of a decision that you make that you know. Had you known, you wouldn't have done it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you definitely got to be careful and do your research and make sure you have a solid understanding of you know how you want to practice your medicine and how you want to treat. I have heard that some of the other clinicians I've talked to that Medicare that doesn't necessarily pay the most but that they do pay, versus some of the, the BUCAs, that don't take forever to reimburse or don't reimburse at all sometimes.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if that's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting and I do think that there are opportunities for NPs to generate more in the Medicare Medicaid space in programs that are run through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. So there's high needs or reach ACOs that nurse practitioners that are taking care of elderly patients with lots of chronic conditions could participate in. There's opportunities for Medicaid managed care opportunities in some states. But again, you have to know that these programs are existing and where they're located and that's what some of what we're trying to do as our organization is really collect a lot of that information so that we can get that out to folks and so that they can be aware that there's opportunities out there. You just got to know where they are, but we also have to know where you are as a nurse practitioner entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:There is no easy way to find out who owns a business and who doesn't entrepreneur and there is no easy way to find out who owns a business and who doesn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure it can be very challenging, and so, you know, one of the things that's challenging for me right now is deciding how to spend my time as the founder of my business.
Speaker 1:And you know, am I, should I be more in the day to day and stay focused in the recruiting and the you know managing relationships with clients, or do I start, you know, kind of stepping back and into more of a leadership and oversight and visionary type of position, now that I have I've hired a full time employee and we have some 1099 contractors that we utilize for different things, and I have a hard time with that like delegation and like trusting that something's gonna get done the way way that I would do it, or that it's going to get done the way I think it should be done, and so that's a that's a challenge for me. So, as a nurse practitioner is growing their practice, how do they, how do you coach them on how to spend their time, like, do they eventually get out of clinical care completely or does that? Is that something they should stay in so they can really lead well in the clinical side?
Speaker 2:I think that's always.
Speaker 2:The challenge is finding that work-life balance in whatever you do, but you do have as a practice owner, you have more flexibility in how that should look than if you're an employed provider, for example. But one of the things that we always say is you want to find the right people to work for your company. You can always teach them the skills, but you can't teach them the personality or the compassion or the same passionate skill set that you have. So finding the right person is the first step and then teaching them the skills is the second step. I think a lot of times we look at oh well, we need somebody that has the skill set and they turn out not to be a good fit for the workflow or they don't get along with your other employees or whatever. So you find the right characteristics, the right person, and then you can teach the skills.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's one of the things that we help clients with is, you know, sometimes it's not always the person with the highest level of experience or the direct experience, because there's things that you can teach and there's things, like you just said, you can't teach, that that are intangibles, that that we really focus on with a client where we're like, okay, the job description is needed and useful, but tell us the things that aren't on the job description that you're really looking for and what the team dynamic is and the culture and what the intangibles are. That's what we're really wanting to help our clients sort through when they're looking at a potential candidate and we've obviously been successful with that and do our part to help clients make good decisions and also the same on the candidate side help them make a good decision because it's a career change for them when we're working with them.
Speaker 2:So I know one thing that when you're looking at employees, a lot of times I hear oh, I can't compete with the hospitals or other. You know bigger institutions. But I do think that as a nurse practitioner you're bringing a different mindset into the mission of your business, and that's what you have to look for is who's going to fit your mission the best. And you know you may not have the best benefits package, but you know what, if that mom that's a medical assistant working with you needs to go pick up her kid from daycare because they're sick, you're going to let them go. Right, you'll figure out how to make the rest of the day work. But that's the kind of things that you can't put that dollar figure on. The other thing is that there's opportunities to maybe provide some additional types of benefits that larger institutions can't as well.
Speaker 2:So there's ways to find talents in that, you know, maybe offering continuing education, or if somebody is a really good medical assistant and you know they'll make a fabulous nurse, maybe there's a way you can work that out. So, and there's opportunities also in your community, if there's a school, to partner with them and get people to work in your practice doing internships. That's another way to find good quality candidates for employment. Just like if you're going to hire NPs you probably want, if you're going to train student in your office, you. That's a great way to find the talent that you want to get into your practice. If you find somebody that really is doing a great job as a student, you might want to hire them on afterwards.
Speaker 2:So there's ways to work around it. But I do think that it's very difficult sometimes to let go of some of this work. But, like I say, the more you understand what's going on in your business and then you can have tools to check and balance things, I think that makes it a little bit easier. And then also the opportunity to work with other NPs who might be experiencing similar situations that you can bounce stuff off of.
Speaker 2:I think that's also very helpful in creating that community, because a lot of times there's questions that come up and you don't know who to ask, and the last place you want to go is on Facebook. You'll never get the best answers there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, wow, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, so for people listening to the podcast that are thinking about getting into small business, whether it's as a clinician or in some other field, I would just say you know, one of the best pieces of advice I could give is to find someone who's done it before and find a good mentor that can, that can help you, and or a group of mentors like a think tank you know, that you can kind of rely on and be able to ask questions to.
Speaker 1:For me that was, that was my grandfather before he passed, and you know I would call him almost weekly and talk through things and get his opinion on things. And there's other people now that I you know, that I stay in touch with and can call on, and so that would be one thing. And then also just to have goals, and so you know when you're thinking about the people listening to the podcast that are thinking about small business. So you know when you're, when you're thinking about the people listening to the podcast that are thinking about small business, or, uh, you know, maybe a nurse practitioner that's working for you know a health system or for for a healthcare company that's wanting to get started and do their own practice. What, what kind of um advice or inspiration would you give them?
Speaker 2:I think the first thing that you said hits it on the head is you know what type of practice that you want to develop and maybe you have several ideas, but bounce them off of people who you know will give you good criticism back and good recommendations. Surround yourself with folks that understand the nursing model, the nursing model of care delivery and nurses, because that's really huge. You don't want to partner with somebody who doesn't understand that and then it ends up costing you financially in the long run and that's not good. And then getting your business skill set, getting your core foundation understanding of business, so that you know what to look for and what to look out for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think what you said too understanding what kind of understanding your market as well as you can, your community. What's the? Where's the greatest opportunity to help people as a clinician? And then, if you're looking at any other kind of business, understand the market, really have a very good understanding of the business you want to get into and business principles in general. To me, for people who are really itching for it and just haven't taken that first step yet, take that first step. Even offer the service for free and ask for feedback, to just test the market and see that there's an opportunity to provide value. And that may not work on the nurse practitioner side, but for other businesses, especially a service-based business, you could test the market that way.
Speaker 2:Well, and it is true, you should understand what the market is around you and the viability of the type of practice that you want to set up. Like I said, lots of people are opening up these medical spas and doing aesthetics. But you know, if you're going to do that as a cash paying basis and there's 20 other people doing the same thing, that decreases your likelihood that you're going to get a good amount of people that will come through your door as a new established business. But one thing I can say is we have and impend the opportunity when you become a member, to take advantage of our expertise and you get one hour free consulting. We utilize that to help nurse practitioners get the questions answered. Is this something that I want to do? These are my thoughts. You know what looks reasonable to start with and unfortunately a lot of them just have so many different tentacles and it's like, okay, let's talk about what's the first thing that we can start with and then add the other other things in along the way.
Speaker 2:Looking at the pathway, it's not easy to do a business at all. There's a lot of moving parts, but when you have a community and people behind you that'll support you along the way. That's really what's going to add value in the long run. And there hasn't been an organization. There's bits and pieces that you can get out there, but there's not a group. That's really kind of tied it all together as much as we have. And we vet all of our partners so we make sure that they're, you know, reliable and they understand the nursing model and they're really, you know, familiar with the mission of nurse practitioner practices. So that's the first thing. So all of our folks are vetted in that regard. So we're not just making relationships with folks to gain any financial benefit. We're doing it to give nurse practitioners all the best opportunities out there to be successful, because we know if all these MP practice owners are successful, that's going to change healthcare in this country, and right now it is bad. It's bad and who knows where it's going to go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's in a rough spot, but there's. I think there's a lot of hope for the future too and hopefully there can be. It's hard to change a system that's so big as the health care system, but you know it starts with individual people and how we all can impact our individual communities, and so I'm excited to see, hopefully, where it moves in a positive direction. I'm excited to see, hopefully, where it moves in a positive direction. We'll tell us, as we kind of come to a close here for the podcast, a little bit more about where we can find you and find NPN and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Great, yeah. So wwwnnpenorg is our website address and when you go on, you'll be able to look at a lot of the resources that we have available. There is a lot of member benefit opportunities that are not accessible to the general public, but some of the things, like I said, we offer is the one hour free consulting with our founders. There's three of us. One's a nurse attorney. One's been a practice owner for over 20 years. I'm a practice owner with coding, billing, documentation, expertise, so you know we cover the three areas that most people have trouble with.
Speaker 2:We have discounts from our partners to get services, such as if you need health insurance, if you need, if you want to do a weight management program, if you need a website, started up all of these things. We're vetting folks for those opportunities and we're constantly changing and getting more and more. We're actually announcing four new partners at our conference this week, so yeah, so it's very exciting. We have an internal discussion board so all of our MPs can connect in a safe space to ask questions. We have a monthly meeting of our members specifically talking about issues regarding being a practice owner meeting for them, so that's something that we're probably going to launch after the new year, and then we have our office hours, which again that's a lot of recorded content that's out there.
Speaker 2:And you know, our goal really is and I should say we're actually launching a new project we're creating a directory of nurse practitioner entrepreneurs so that we can patients can find us, nurse practitioners can find each other and students can find preceptors, and we're very excited about it because I think this is going to link us all together in ways that we can leverage our collective, our collectivism, to get better business arrangements, better service contracts, better payer contracts, better leverage with legislation and, who knows, I mean there's plenty of opportunities out there getting data, having researchers have nurse practitioner entrepreneurs that they can research. So there's a lot of opportunity that we think this, this platform, will, will provide. So we're very excited about it.
Speaker 1:Well, that's, that's a perfect overview and I appreciate you you sharing, and I'll. I'll leave a link to the website in the show notes at the bottom of the podcast, and I just wanted to say thank you again for for being on the podcast and I hope you have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and I did forget one thing though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 2:Our Business Basics Accelerator course. We're hosting another one next month that'll start in April. So if anybody is really serious about wanting to start a business, I would highly recommend taking the course. It's 12 weeks online and it really gives you all the foundation that you need to start your business. So, um that opportunity is is is here now and available, so we appreciate um anybody that's interested in wanting to know more information to reach out.
Speaker 1:Perfect, Well, I will, uh, I'll leave. I'll try to leave a link to that as well, and uh, yeah, thank you again. I appreciate you being on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Pleasure to be here, thank you.