Welcome to DPC Pediatrician. We’re Dr. Phil Boucher and Dr. Marina Capella, two DPC pediatricians who are on a mission to share our love of direct primary care with you. Hi, everyone. I am so pleased to introduce you to Dr. Jelan Burton. She is owner of Healthy Home Pediatrics, which operates in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.
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And her direct pediatric care practice is 85% house calls and about 15% in-office visits. And today, we’re going to have a conversation about… really kind of like balancing life in DPC and specifically touch on some issues that are especially important for women, women of childbearing age or women who are still raising children. And of course,
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some of this for some of you males out there listening, it can also be applicable because it’s not just women who are trying to balance you know, family life and work, but it does touch women’s lives in a little different way. So Jelan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me.
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Yeah.
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So first I want to ask a little bit about your story. What kind of drove you into the world of DPC? When did you open your practice? How did you navigate that transition?
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Yeah. I call myself somewhat of a reluctant entrepreneur. Like I was one of those people that thought I was going to be doing academic medicine forever in a federally qualified health center, you know, because those were all of my mentors and my guides mostly when I was in medical school.
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But when I became, I had a wonderful experience in residency. I went to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and And we had a pediatric primary care residency. So in that residency program, I was able to do so many different experiences in primary care that I think it
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started planting some seeds that I didn’t have to be traditionally academic or traditionally outpatient that I could kind of craft things that worked better for myself. So when I was recruited for multiple jobs after residency, I got what I thought was going to be my dream job, you know,
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and I went there with eyes wide open and open to all the experiences, listening to everything that my supervisor said, because she had been one of my preceptors when I was a medical student. So, you know, I’m thinking she’s got my best interest. She’s watching out for me. And then I got there and everybody was burned out.
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Oh, pretty much everyone, you know, more and more nurse practitioners were coming in with less experience. And they were, you know, acting at the same level that we were, but also not having the same training. And so there were things that made me feel very uncomfortable. And every time I brought that up to my supervisor,
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it was like, well, you’re not being a team player. I’m like, but I’m not her supervisor. Like, I shouldn’t be the one. you know, directing her care. She should be doing that herself. And then again, just going back to everybody being so burned out, you know, those 10 minute appointments.
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Like I think my first year of being an attending, like follow-up appointments, they switched them to being 10 minutes. And it was a follow up if they saw anyone in the practice at all. So these could be a brand new patient to you. You haven’t seen them before, but you got 10 minutes.
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And that is not the type of medicine that I like. It’s safe. It’s not healthy. It’s not good. So I would leave, you know, my sessions feeling like I’d gotten, you know, run over by a bus. You’ve got. patients stack three and four per slot. So they come into the appointment being angry and you’re like, I’m sorry,
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I had nothing to do with that. So my husband is wonderful. He is a professor and he does a lot of work on, unfortunately, exploitation and propaganda and conspiracies. And so he’s telling me, and he’s just like, you know, you’re being exploited, right? And I’m like, what are you talking about?
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And then,
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you know, he’s sharing different readings with me and we’re talking and I’m talking to my friends and I’m like, you know what, this is not safe and it’s not healthy and it’s not good. And so I was recruited to be the medical director of the DC Medicaid for children with special needs, home visiting nurses,
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home visiting social workers. And I will go to these big meetings at healthcare finance, you know, here in DC. And I’d be like, y’all, this system is not working for the patients. It’s not working for the doctors. You should pay me to be the house call doctor. And I will keep these kids out of the ER.
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I will keep them out of urgent cares, you know, cause we were talking about how every year urgent care use was going up. ER use was going up. Primary care was going down. People weren’t, you know what I mean? Yeah. Diseases were going up. I was like, y’all, I can really do something about this.
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And they’re like, that’s not the way our payment works. And I was like, well, what if we try like an innovative program where, you know, like we pilot it with the most high risk patients. And they’re like, no, that’s not the way our payment works. And so I got some funding from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
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They had, I think it was called Leadership Innovation Fostering Education, like grant program for early career physicians. and they gave me funding for a few years and I they said what do you want to do your project on I said I want to do it on alternative and sustainable practice like
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practice and so I was able to call doctors all over the country and I kept getting brought back to DPC direct primary care concierge medicine house calls and just kind of doing things differently and so you know I’m calling I’m all these white guys in the midwest and a lot of them were sending me to talk to
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their wives who were their assistants right so there’s like their practice managers and i’m like hmm how does this work but then i thought back to residency and a lot of the primary care physicians their wives were their office managers and i’m like well i don’t have a wife to do that like his own job So,
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you know, I really sought out mentors in other fields, like some of the midwives and the doulas and different people in this area. And actually, one of the first things I did was start a group for wellness professionals that were women, women of color, in particular here in D.C., in Maryland, Virginia. And so we’ve got chiropractor, peds,
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dentist, me, the pediatrician, the family medicine doctor, you know, like all different people. And we just share best practices. And so that’s kind of what brought me to my practice. And I launched in 2019. In between then, I did a little bit of private practice.
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And that was even worse, you know, like, see 40 patients, because we got to keep the doors open. I was just like, I live and work in an underserved community where every single year I’m told the health outcomes are getting worse.
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But a lot of these clinics are getting millions of dollars every year to do the same work. I was like, this is not making sense to me. And so for me, it was as a mom and as a person living in underserved community, it was like, I cannot give my community less than they deserve.
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And I can’t give myself less than I deserve. And I can’t give my family less than I deserve. And so I launched in 2019. And a little section of my closet. And then I expanded into, I ended up taking over a whole section of our basement pantry.
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And then my husband and I invested in 2023 and we converted our garage at 750 square foot into an office. So I have an office and I have a community gathering space. Cause it’s really important for me to do group activities and bring people together and have a place that’s safe and comfortable for them. Yeah.
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And so I’m going into my sixth year and my DPC and I’m not looking back.
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That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that. So I’m curious for those that might be listening that are still kind of in the contemplative phase or in the startup phase or just beginning, what are some things that you learned through your path and about first establishing, like what’s really important in the beginning,
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because there’s a lot of advice out there, a lot of conflicting messages. And I see people kind of getting confused or just trying to follow the blueprint that someone else followed and not creating their own. So what would you say is really important for that establishing phase?
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Yeah, I think so. I’m often the person, you know, we’re active in a lot of these Facebook groups together. I am often the person that’s like, please take a breath. Please slow down. Please clean a little bit more because I feel like, especially in the last, I’ll say probably since 2021, I’ve seen so many people be like,
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I’m burned out in my current position. I’m going to leave and I’m going to launch my DPC. And it’s like, well, we know that you’ll, that’s pretty traumatic because And maybe you need to take some time and do some therapy. Maybe instead of, you know, jumping straight into DPC, maybe, you know,
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be a contractor somewhere else for a little while. So one of the things I think people are not spending enough time on, and I wish I had done a little bit more of was knowing myself first, really sitting back and being like, I don’t have to be on anybody’s
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um uh dyke drummond wrote the book stop position burnout and he talks about like when you’re going through your training you’re almost on like a railroad track right and you don’t get to deviate it is you do medical school you do residency you
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know after residency you can go and be an attending and most of the time you’re just going along this thing but being an attending means you have a four-wheel drive off-road vehicle Like you need to figure out where you want that vehicle to go or it just can go any it can go willy nilly.
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And so I wish I had sat back a little bit more and just done some like deep diving into like what makes my my blood boil. You know what I mean? Like what are the things that I absolutely cannot live without? What are the things that I’m really good at? what are the things I’m terrible at, right?
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Like I did not even think about how terrible I was with finishing my notes, right? Like I am terrible. And the only way I finished my notes is when I had my boss being like, your notes are due on Friday at noon.
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And I would stay up all day on Wednesday and Thursday and they’d be done by noon. But when you’re an entrepreneur, you do not have anybody doing that for you. So that was one of my big like wake up moments. It was like, Holy crap.
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Like you didn’t think about all the things that you’re weak in that you needed support in. So I don’t think people do that. I think, you know, you hear in these groups sometimes, oh, I’m doing my own bookkeeping. I’m doing my own marketing. I’m doing my own this and that.
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But does it look like your eight year old did your marketing? You know, like, does it look like do your books look like, you know, you’re not going to pass an audit from the,
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you know,
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aggressive? Like, those are the things that I wish I had slowed myself down into thinking. And I wish that the newbies, when I hear them saying, I’m launching, I’m launching, I’m launching. Can you guys look at my logo? I’m like, what’s your plan to make sure that you don’t need to side hustle after a few years?
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And they don’t even, you know, like folks just, you don’t even realize that. Like most of us are not profitable for several years. So what is going to make that money? while you’re building your practice. So yeah, what things are you excellent at? What things boil your blood?
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What things do you really need support in that maybe other people don’t, you know? Like, are you neurodiverse? Are you, do you have learning disabilities? Like, what are the things that you, if you were like building an IEP or, you know, an IFSP for a student, what do you think you need as a business owner almost?
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I don’t think you need that. Other things that I wish I had done when I was establishing and that I really want to see people do is really knowing the season they’re in, especially for women. We were talking even before we came on here about like people being like, hey,
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I’m having a baby and I’m starting my DPC practice. And like I did that. And, you know, one of my DPC friends, Rosanna, did that.
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Uh-huh.
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You like one of the things that I told Rosanna as soon as she was as soon as, you know, she got pregnant. I was just like, girl, take your expectations of yourself from before you had kids and like wipe them away because it is not fair to yourself to think that while you’re breastfeeding. Right.
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That you’re going to be able to be out in the community outreaching to five or six different other businesses every single month when you’ve got this baby at home. Yeah, three kids. My daughter, my youngest is four. We have a six year old and we have a 13 year old.
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And, you know, looking at other people’s indicators of success. It’s just a way to set yourself up for failure because you’re always going to feel like a failure when people are like, oh, I’ve got 150 patients. Oh, I’ve got 400 patients. And I’m like, I’m trying to wean this baby.
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I’m trying to get this baby to sleep through the night, managing my sick patients. And that is all I can do. And guess what? That’s OK. Like, that is a lot. But to compare myself to other people who, for example, like, you know,
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we’re talking like a lot of the doctors that I was reaching out to when I was doing my project with AAP. These were older white men in the Midwest and a lot of their wives were their practice managers.
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Right.
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The level of support that they had at home and at work. Mine didn’t even touch. Like my dad is my nanny. He’s the bomb. But there’s some things he’s not doing. He’s not cooking. You know what I mean? Like my husband is wonderful and he’s supportive.
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But there’s some things like with his career, he’s just not able to do. So I think knowing your season and knowing yourself are really important, especially for women in medicine. and especially for women who are mothers in DPC.
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Yeah, I think those messages are so important. One of them being like, know yourself, right? Because sometimes we’re burned out. Like I definitely came up from a place of a lot of burnout a few years before I started my DPC. And thankfully I had to move due to a family circumstance.
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I had to take an urgent care gig. It gave me the ability to kind of recover, to have a financial safety plan while I launched my DPC. And so I wasn’t coming right into it from a place of severe burnout. And I didn’t realize the importance of that until now, looking back, right? Yeah.
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But I think it’s true. People come into it sometimes, and it’s not to say it can’t work. It just means you have to be careful, right? If you’re leaping into it from a place of severe burnout, just be careful because you can perpetuate some of the same dysfunction that got
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you to the place that you were before without realizing, right? We perpetuate some of our own dysfunction in our lives in general, including in our professional lives, right? Mm-hmm.
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Yep. Yep. I agree totally. You know, and going back to these groups that we’re both active in, it’s like every week you hear about two practices opening and one practice closing. And when you ask people like, why did they close? It was like, I didn’t have a clear financial plan.
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You know, I didn’t take enough time to like think things through. And so, you know, these are the mistakes that we don’t want the next generation to have. I don’t want them to have the same, you know,
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Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We want each other to succeed, right? But you have to plan accordingly to optimize your chances of success. Tell me a little bit more about, you know, you mentioned you have three children. What did that look like for you? Probably you had some of those children after you opened your DPC. How did you manage?
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One common question from women is like, if I have to go on maternity leave and I am the physician of my DPC practice, how do I navigate that?
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Yeah, that was a tough one. Thankfully I had had a, I’m just going to call it a good learning experience in my position before where breastfeeding was not supported, you know, and there were no, there was no time for us to take breaks and breastfeed me and a medical assistant that I worked with.
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And every time we advocated for ourselves, We were met with this like wall of reservations and, you know, honestly deceit around like what our rights were. And, you know, when you are relying on your check, you’re relying on your job, right? You don’t want to talk too much. You don’t want to say too much.
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So I went into it being like, I’m definitely going to be better than that boss, but I’m also going to establish some really good policies and procedures that then I can share with other people. So I think one of the things that was so important to me was like,
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what do I really need to be successful in this newborn period? What do I really need to successfully breastfeed? And, you know, thankfully I already had a 13 year, well, he’s 13 now. But I’d already had one child that I had during residency and my residency preceptors were amazing. Multiple, multiple, multiple women.
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We would stop rounds, you know, early so that I could go eat and pump. And so they had already shown me and modeled to me how important it was. So then when I ended up in private practice and my boss was completely unsupportive of it,
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I still had in my head like the ideal and what it should be. And so it was time to establish my own when I, you know, got pregnant. So I had in my first year of my DPC practice, I had a toddler and my older child. So I think.
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the middle child he was weaning like i was almost done with pumping so i did a little bit of pumping in the beginning but it was nothing intense but my daughter she was born in march of 2020 which is right in the pandemic right yes so it hit at
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a time when like my birth plan had to get all changed so i she was my second home birth baby that i had with a midwife and i also had an ob-gyn so they were collaborating my care I was advanced maternal age at that point. So I was like,
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I want to make sure I have OBGYN who’s okay with me birthing at home and a midwife. So if everything goes well, go ahead and have the home birth. If things don’t go well, I’ve got my OBGYN that has my back. And so- everything changed with the birth plan. Like even like who could be there, you know,
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like my doula, like needed to be virtual for most of it. Like my mother-in-law couldn’t be there. My mom could be there. My husband could be there. My kids had to go to my parents’ house. You know, there were all of these things. Having a really great support system was key. So I think
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Having that postpartum and intrapartum doula already lined up was key. I had a perinatal therapist, which she focuses specifically on helping women have healthy pregnancies and healthy birth experiences. And so she did a conference call of like everyone who was involved with my birth.
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Mm hmm.
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so that I could feel super supported. And I think that just really, really, really helped me be successful. Let’s see, how else did I balance? We have a lot of support. I mean, I could still use so much more, but my dad is our nanny. Keeping my kids up every day from school when they’re sick.
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My mom and my dad, they both have the kids. My mom is like, I’m retired. I’m not your nanny. Your daddy’s your nanny, but she’s still there. You know, if, if we need her, it helps with, you know, with dropping them off. My husband is a professor, so his job is really flexible.
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So again, I think it’s kind of going back to the first questions. It’s really knowing like what you have, right? Like I knew, like I have health insurance for my husband. I knew He’s off in the summers, you know, like I just knew certain things were just the way that my life was.
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And so then I started building up the support. So, I mean, throughout I’ve made, I won’t say mistakes, but I’ve tried things and then some of the things didn’t work. And then it’s like, just try something else until you get, you know, the optimal support. And I’m still working on that. It’s always a work in progress,
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but I think investing in help at home and in business is key and not forgetting that both of those things So, like, our cleaning crew came and cleaned the house. Like, we have housekeeper and home organizers who come once a month. drawers, cabinets, all those things. I’m like, throw them in there. It’s fine. Nobody can see it.
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But we have a team that comes once a month and helps us with that. So balancing the three kids is really about like knowing what works for us. And again, my office is here in the back of my house. So like my kids can really come knocking on my window door when they get home to school.
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Like, okay, mama, like it’s time to shut it down and let’s get to it. So I shut it down for a few hours and then usually I try not to work evenings, but sometimes I do, you know, just, Yeah, a few things. And I also really do try to treat myself very well.
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That’s one of my central commitments is one of my team’s commitments. But that is like I try not to work on Fridays. Like Fridays are my self-care days. I meet with my trainer. I go to the gym. I get my hair done, nails done, all of that. Those are Fridays when we do our appointments, too.
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So I think really time blocking, knowing your schedule and getting support are key for me. Yeah. And I would love a full time au pair. We’re going to get there someday. Someday, someday, someday.
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So yeah.
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Yeah. I’m sorry. And I didn’t answer. You said maternity leave. So DPC patients are so wonderful. So everybody knew that I was pregnant, right? Like obviously they could see this big old belly of mine. And so what I did was the baby was born in March.
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I saw everybody who needed an appointment from like March to like June. I saw them early and So in person, do everything, even though it’s a little off schedule. So then when I took my maternity leave, I think I took four, I took four to six weeks of like, no contact, like,
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even though I’m going to want to text you, I’m going to get my family and friends to not let me text you to not get on spruce. And I had Dr. Marguerite DeWayne, Dr. Matthew Hayden, and then a house call nurse, nurse Heidi here in DC. They, if, if, if there was anything I gave my patients,
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cause I do DC, Maryland and Virginia, they had who to call if it was an urgent issue. I think one family got a call for, it was like a newborn and she and the midwife managed the newborn. She did call me in to help with that cause she didn’t have as much experience.
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But by that time, I think I was like, And so I was able to handle a lot of things by phone. I continued telemedicine for like two to three months. And then when the baby was three months old, I think she was like three or four months old.
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I went back and just started seeing like infants and newborns. and yeah slowly phase things in and again this was all during the pandemic nobody really wanted visits anyway but it was more like I just want to make sure all the
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babies are healthy and good you know I would wear my N95 I would you know strip my clothes off in the basement throw them into the washer right because we didn’t know like and we didn’t know in the beginning and it was super scary and I had my own
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newborn so it worked really it worked really really really well
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Nice. That’s wonderful. And I think I’ve heard that from a couple of women who maternity leave during their, you know, after they opened their practices, that DPC families are very like generous in their views and their accommodations. Cause they’ve, they’ve had children obviously,
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or else they would not be our patients and they know what that phase of life is like. And, but I like how you had a system of kind of backup coverage, because if you were to just like, say, I’m just closing doors for a while. You know, they wouldn’t be willing to pay during that time, most typically.
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Now, that’s not to say you can’t do that. You know, there are other ways of doing it, maybe just not charging families or pausing the memberships. It’s up to you as the physician and practice owner what to do. But I love that you shared your example of what you did. So I’m curious,
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what were some of the mistakes that you made, especially kind of in the early phases of your DPC journey or even intermediate phases as well that other people can learn from?
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Mm hmm. I think Nitin, one of our DPC friends online, Nitin Gupta, he was like, don’t drink the Kool-Aid. There is no one size fits all. And I think in the beginning, like I was looking at a lot of this online information as like, it is the end all be all. And these people know more than me.
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And what you realize is, like, they just might be a year or two ahead of you. You know what I mean? Like, they are still figuring it out, too. You know, I’m going into year number six. I think, you know, Andrea is going into year number seven. Nitin might be year number six or seven, eight.
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Like, we’re still all pretty new in terms of businesses, right? Like, I don’t know anybody in our groups that have been open for a decade other than my mentor, Dr. Matthew Mintz here in Maryland. He’s been around for 10 years. I think actually Marguerite DeWayne and Matthew Hayden might have been around for about 10 years,
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but that’s it. You know what I mean? Like it’s really not. So there are not a lot of long-term practices. So I think- you know, like we were talking beforehand, there’s so many different ways of doing it. And everybody is so different that when you’ve heard of one DPC, like you’ve heard of one DPC,
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when you’ve heard of one concierge practice, you’ve heard of one concierge practice and that’s it. So I think I looked again to too many of these groups and I didn’t set what my vision was, right? Like we were talking also about how like You can use some of the tools that you had in traditional practice that were
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burning you out and you try to apply them. So even like in the beginning, I set my prices based on what insurance companies would reimburse for. And then I just added like $50 and it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like you can’t provide the level of service that you are,
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that you are committed to at this fee, but you don’t know that. I had an accountant and a bookkeeper in the beginning, but I think what would have been really helpful would have been to do just like a general coaching program with people in different disciplines. Because to lessons learned, I definitely think setting your own vision.
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I think reading things that help you to reflect on like who you are as a business owner can be really helpful. So one of the things that I read like, oh my goodness, like 15 to 15. 20 books a year, self-help business books, marketing books, everything. I’m just reading, reading, reading.
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And so The Rockefeller Habits is a book that I found very helpful. It was recommended by my business coach, Fabian, and she recommended it. And it’s literally, it’s really, really short book, really, really quick read. I think I listened to it on audio while I was like commuting.
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And it focuses on like setting like a one page summary, like for your business and your team commitments. And so even going through that exercise of like, what is really super important to me and what do people need to know even when they’re applying to be on my team,
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I think was so key because I didn’t have anything like that, you know, set up before. I think investing in your practice, free online groups are great and good, but they are not enough. And I have invested thousands of dollars at this point in professional coaching. And
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the biggest leaps have been because I had coaches who had more experience than me, you know what I mean? And had the time and the energy and the thoughtfulness to like plan things out and walk me through. You know, I think it’s so great that you and Phil, you know, have this podcast for folks.
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And I think it’s so great that you have your online academy that you’re launching, because I think sometimes people need to go deeper. And when you need to go deeper, it’s the same way you’re investing in your education. And we spent, you know, Hundreds of thousands of dollars on our education.
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Like you have to invest that into your business savvy. You have to invest that into like making sure you know what your services are, who your ideal customers are. So I think all that is important. And we were even talking about how like some of the information that you get online
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is wrong or it’s just not catered to you. You know, it’s not catered to you. It’s catered to somebody that is different than you. And again, like, I think I love the docs in the Midwest and the guy docs, the nice ones, not the mean ones, not the slurking ones, but I love them for, for
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for sharing their resources and sharing their information, but then for also being like, this might not be applicable to you. You know what I mean? Like those where their wives or their practice managers, you know, in particular, like the wives were so helpful and they took the time out, but it’s just like,
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but they’re not the clinician and the business owner, you know, they’re seeing different things. So I think those are, those are some of the things that the lessons learned and the mistakes. And then I also think not speaking again to my strengths and my limitations enough, not really leaning into that.
28:39
So like, I’ll just give a personal example. I get really nervous when it comes to budgeting and planning. Like I grew up, my mom was a stay at home mom. My dad worked in international trucking. He was a manager. So money was kind of always a little like, not scarce. Like we lived in a nice house.
28:56
We lived in a nice neighborhood, but it was always just like, We don’t quite have enough for that. So when I came into my DPC, what I noticed was that like I would like hoard money and I’d be too scared to spend it. And I wouldn’t when I would see people like defaulting on their like memberships,
29:13
like I wouldn’t say anything because I’m like, I know they’re struggling financially. I don’t want to say anything, but you can’t run a business like that. So I brought back my old accountant. She is my membership manager. So what I realized is I needed somebody else to be the person in there seeing whose
29:31
memberships are not run on the fifth. I gave her the template of what she could send them. And then she sends it. So like once a month, twice a month, she’ll reach out and she’ll be like, Jay, I need you to call X, Y, and Z. I’ve sent them portal messages. Can you send them a text message?
29:48
And then if I don’t get the money by the following week, I’m going to have you call them. And she knows that she has to hold my hand so much that she makes appointments with me for me to call. She knows if it’s on my list to call these people and tell them that they owe me money,
30:05
I’m not going to do it. And every time we meet, I’d be like, I didn’t call them. She’s like, you’re going to call them today. So I think getting that support, that is some of the lessons learned. And other people don’t need that level of support, but I do. In my practice,
30:17
I think we’ve got one member or two members that owe money when before it used to be a lot more. Um, so that took time for me to know myself and to not feel bad and not feel ashamed. You know, like you go on these groups and I’m like, well,
30:30
nobody else has anybody making sure that their memberships get paid. And it’s like, but because it makes you nervous, that’s the support that you need.
30:39
Exactly. I love your message about investing in yourself, investing in like your business, because that is true. I think I also kind of read too many of the DPC docs, Facebook groups that were like, oh, I started up with only $5,000 or with this. And that’s not to say that you can’t. Be lean.
30:57
You can make wise choices when it comes to finances, but don’t try to skimp on everything because that’s not really a recipe for success in the long term. Right. Can you get good enough? Yes. For me, I decided I wanted to be really integrative in my practice called Healing Arts Pediatrics.
31:15
And so that kind of denotes that integrative approach to medicine that I have. But I had to invest in going to a lot of seminars to learn something called myofascial release. I went to herbalism retreats. I pursued a fellowship in integrative medicine, which I completed earlier this year.
31:33
But that was tens of thousands of dollars that I had to put into that. And it was painful to make those decisions because I also come a bit from a bit of kind of scarcity mindset around money. But something told me I’m a believer in intuition and my intuition told me this is worth it.
31:50
This is worth the investment. Do it. It’ll pay off. But I mean, that doesn’t mean I have done things perfectly. I’ve definitely had those hard moments around money like you alluded to that. I’m the one who apparently I need to hire someone like you have. You should get Rachel. I’ll send you her info. Excellent.
32:09
Because it is hard to, it’s these families that you love and these parents that you have great relationships with. Having that conversation about money can be really difficult. I’ve gotten better at it, but it’s, it can still be difficult.
32:21
So I like somebody $30 an hour. It takes her 10 minutes to get through multiple people when it would take me hours and I would agonize. And it’s just like, it’s just not worth it.
32:34
Exactly. Exactly. Thank you so much for sharing about your story and the lessons learned and your advice for others that are starting or exploring this world of direct pediatric care. I love what you’re doing. Keep doing it. And any last words of wisdom?
32:52
Definitely. I want everyone in DPC to set themselves up for success. I think especially women and mothers in medicine, we just do things differently on purpose. I was a different doctor as a mom in residency than some of my other colleagues. I had these unique experiences that I could bring to the table.
33:10
I think finding my community has helped so much. I have developed communities of not just physicians, but pediatric dentists, chiropractor. I run a local group where we get together every single season in person and we’re on like a group chat and we have regular webinars where we’re talking. And I think, you know,
33:31
the things that I learned from the doulas and the midwives and the chiropractors and the family medicine docs and the allergy doc, I think all of that just helps me in my practice. I think the professional coaching, you know, just like you, I have invested thousands of dollars at this point. in those things.
33:48
And I think they’ve helped so much. And similar to you, at this point, I feel like sharing the legacy with other people is really important. So in January, I will be launching a online mentorship program with my mentor, Dr. Matthew Mintz. And then also in particular, he’s going to be speaking to physicians that are 50 and over.
34:07
and transitioning into DPC and integrative medicine. And I am gonna be speaking to mothers in medicine that are thinking about this shift and also women of color in particular, because none of those programs existed for us when we launched and none of them exist now. And it’s something that I think is very needed.
34:24
And so I’m really excited about this legacy phase of like, how do we make sure that the next generation gets to start out better and stronger and healthier than we did so that we all can have, I think ultimately, joyful and sustainable practices that make ourselves and our communities healthier is something that I am so passionate about.
34:44
So thank you so much for giving me the chance to talk about this.
34:47
Oh, absolutely. And I’m excited to hear about your coaching program. Phil and I are also mostly, me behind it, but Phil will be helping out too. We’re also launching a group coaching program specifically specifically for the startup fundamentals in January. And we’re excited about that,
35:02
but I’m happy to share about yours because I really believe that we just present people with the resources that are out there and they kind of choose what’s the best fit for them. So yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, Jelan. And thanks everyone for listening.
