I’m practicing chiropractic full time and curious at what point adding in a Functional Medicine software [would] be cost-effective. [At] what point did you add this in your practice?

Well, my situation is a little bit different because I started right from scratch practicing full-time Functional Medicine, so I never actually practiced acupuncture outside of the student clinic in school. I still do it with my family and friends occasionally, but I just went right into Functional Medicine full time. For me, it made sense right away for that reason. I think for you, it will depend. What I’ve heard from other practitioners, particularly chiropractors in the program, is that if they make the transition gradually, they start to kind of offer Functional Medicine services to their existing similar patients, the ones who are interested. And then they start advertising it to the new patients, and after a period of time, they might end up finding that 20 percent to 30 percent of their practice is Functional Medicine and maybe that ramps up to 30 percent or 40 percent. I think at that point, it’s a serious endeavor and you definitely want to have a kind of infrastructure to support it then. You could consider using a free EHR [electronic health record] like Practice Fusion initially, but there are all kinds of privacy concerns with that, and also, if you do switch to a better one like Cerbo later, then you have to handle the hassle of transferring all that data over, which is a lot of work, let me tell you. I know that from experience. At some point, you probably just have to bite the bullet and take a leap of faith to get that up and running. Lots of people practiced Functional Medicine just with paper charts and files for long before EMRs really even came around, so that’s always an option, too, and

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then you could hire someone for probably a pretty low cost and put that stuff into the EHR once you do it. There are a lot of ways to approach it.