Chris Kresser: They are employees. In our contract, our clinicians are employees. I’d say it’s probably more common for them to be independent contractors. My co-director, Dr. Schweig, worked at several different clinics before we teamed up, and he was typically an independent contractor and paid that way at those clinics. Usually it’s some split of the fee that’s charged to patients. At CCFM, our clinicians are employees. They get health insurance, they get benefits, and they are also paid on the basis of how many patient hours they see, but there are incentives built into the contract. I structured it that way because I want to create a longer-term relationship that supports them, that’s mutually beneficial and provides a great, more secure kind of working environment, because I think that will make happier employees and patients and just a better work experience for everybody involved. But if you’re just starting out, it would be possible to start someone as an independent contractor and then transition them into employee status once they hit a certain number of hours. That’s one way that you could do it.
As for non-compete and non-solicitation, you’ll find, depending on your state, I think non-compete is somewhat difficult to enforce, but it is something to consider. We have that for functional medicine, specifically. We don’t say, “You can’t practice any other kind of medicine anywhere,” but we say, “As long as you’re working here, you can’t practice functional medicine somewhere else and solicit patients for a functional medicine practice elsewhere.”