Voices in Health and Wellness

Stretching the Boundaries of Traditional Rehab

• Dr Andrew Greenland • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Ever wondered how successful healthcare practices manage to provide exceptional care while navigating insurance constraints, staffing challenges, and changing patient expectations? In this revealing conversation, Kristen Berard, CEO of Midland and Freeland Sports Rehab and the Stretch Centre, shares the inner workings of building community-centered wellness spaces in Michigan.

Kristen's journey from criminal justice graduate to healthcare CEO offers a fascinating perspective on leadership in the wellness industry. Coming from outside the medical field has allowed her to focus on operational excellence while empowering clinicians to practice at the highest level. Her approach to building a multidisciplinary team—combining chiropractic, physical therapy, massage therapy, assisted stretching, and acupuncture under one roof—mimics professional sports teams' comprehensive care models, bringing elite-level treatment to everyday patients.

The conversation delves into post-pandemic shifts in healthcare delivery, with Kristen noting how her clinics adapted their hours while maintaining patient volume. She addresses the generational differences in workforce expectations, offering insights into mentoring young clinicians to balance work-life priorities while building sustainable careers. Perhaps most compelling is her candid discussion of the growing tension between insurance mandates and evidence-based care, and how her practice is strategically shifting to a 50/50 insurance-cash model to better serve patients.

Innovation stands at the center of Kristen's leadership approach. Her development of The Stretch Centre as both a patient retention tool and a licensable business model demonstrates how wellness practices can evolve beyond traditional treatment paradigms. By focusing on metrics that balance quality (reviews, patient satisfaction) with business health (collection percentages, visit averages), she's created a blueprint for sustainable growth in a challenging industry.

Ready to rethink your approach to healthcare delivery or wellness practice management? This episode offers practical insights from someone who's mastered the art of growing excellence while staying deeply connected to both providers and patients. Listen now and discover strategies you can implement in your own wellness journey—whether as a provider, practice owner, or health-conscious consumer.

🎙 Guest: Kristin Berard, CEO
Midland and Freeland Sports Rehab & Stretch Center, LLC 

📍 Location: Midland & Freeland, Michigan, USA
🌐 Website: www.midlandsportsrehab.com
📧 Email: jkberard@midlandsportsrehab.com
📞 Phone (Clinic): +1 (989) 341-1070
📞 Phone (Stretch Center): +1 (989) 488-6420 

🔗 Connect with Kristin:
🔹 LinkedIn – Kristin Berard
🔹 https://www.facebook.com/Midland.FreelandSportsRehab
🔹 Instagram – @midland.freelandsportsrehab/ 

Dr Andrew Greenland:

So welcome back to Voices in Health and Wellness. This is the show where we spotlight the founders, the clinicians and wellness leaders who are shaping the future of care. I'm your host, andrew Greenland, and today I'm thrilled to be speaking with someone who truly exemplifies the evolution happening in integrative rehab and wellness care. Christian Berard is the CEO of Midland and Freeland Sports Rehab and the Stretch Centre, two highly respected practices in Michigan that are doing more than just helping people recover. Under Kristen's leadership, they've become community-centred spaces where evidence-based physical therapy, proactive wellness and performance strategies all converge. What really stood out to us about Kristen is her ability to scale excellence while also keeping a finger on the pulse of shifting client expectations, so I think this is going to be a very rich conversation, so let's dive in. So, kristen, thank you very much for joining us on the show today. Hopefully, everything I said was accurate, but please feel free to correct me if I've said anything that doesn't match up with your business.

Kristin Berard:

No, you make me sound great. If I could get my husband and my whole entire team to talk like you do, I'll feel exceptional every day when I go to work.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

You're very welcome, so perhaps you could share a little bit about your role and what a typical week looks like as a CEO across these different locations.

Kristin Berard:

Yeah, so I will say that my role as a CEO is going to look a little bit different, because my husband actually is the one that started the practice. So we are related. So I wasn't brought in as an external employee that comes in and kind of manages the organization. So there's definitely some dynamics that go with being married to the business owner and also running things. But I think that we do work very well together.

Kristin Berard:

As far as what I typically do is, I oversee the overall operations and so I try to separate what is being done in the clinic meaning how patients are being treated separate from my role, because I am not not a doctor and I did not go to medical school and so I definitely don't try and tell our providers how to do their job treating.

Kristin Berard:

But I also have to listen to all of the issues that we're having, whether it be with different patients or our partners. And then the dreaded health insurance mandates, and those are, I know, here in the US are changing very rapidly and it's affecting not only our organization but a lot of organizations nationally and probably, I have to assume, globally as well. They're dealing with some of those things. So I really sit down with our employees and listen to what's going on, and then we kind of come up with a game plan and we have different team leaders and assign different roles, aside from just what they do. But it's really involving everyone in the organization, because everyone needs to be bought in to your organization in order for it to be successful.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Amazing. So what is the secret sauce of your locations? What do you do that your clinicians, your providers do that kind of makes you stand out?

Kristin Berard:

So what's interesting is prior to moving to Michigan.

Kristin Berard:

So I am originally from Michigan and my husband is kind of transient.

Kristin Berard:

He's lived all over the world and when we met he was living in Florida and he really liked that transient area of South Florida people coming from all over the world, different cultures, different walks of life and he really enjoyed their very forward thinking in South Florida.

Kristin Berard:

So when we came to Michigan we really thought about what worked well in South Florida and tried to bring a lot of that here but also understand what the community needs. And so prior to moving here we did a lot of competitive analysis and there was really no sports rehab, chiropractor anywhere in the area that we could find and that was something that Jeff has kind of made his whole life and whole practice to be. And so we were able to bring that here and then really get involved in the community and I'm talking really like deep dive involved in the community. And so we would go to all sorts of events. We would meet with different business people, go into businesses and talk to the different organizations and learn the different things that people were looking for, and then we would come back and talk about it and ruminate about it and then that's how we would make decisions. In growing our practice, we would meet the needs of our patients as opposed to what we just thought we needed inside the clinic.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Got it. So I was going to say what led you into this space, but I guess it might be Jeff. I don't know what else would you have been doing if you weren't sort of in this particular space, in a sort of CEO capacity.

Kristin Berard:

So this is the funniest story, and all of my employees are learning this right now. Our team members are learning because I started a new thing in January. It's called Coffee with Kristen, and it gives me an opportunity to go out, have a you know, an hour or two hour meeting with one of our team members, learn more about them, but allow them to ask me questions, things that you know. I tell them. I am an open book. You can ask me anything other than how much money is in my bank account. I will tell you anything you want to know, because I feel that's how you develop a good relationship and trust with someone.

Kristin Berard:

And so the funny story is I have a degree in criminal justice and public administration. I never saw myself as much of a leader growing up. My dad was an hourly union worker for an automaker and it kind of I landed in it. When I met Jeff, I realized there was a specific need inside of these healthcare organizations, that a lot of these doctors don't understand how to operate a business properly, and a lot of doctors have money issues. They don't know how to manage the money properly, and it's not their fault. The schools aren't teaching them how to properly operate a business, and so a lot of them want to go out and do do their own thing, but they don't have anybody to guide them.

Kristin Berard:

And so I started to see that when Jeff and I started dating and I just kind of kept taking one step after another after another and helping him get some financial freedom and really kind of put some of those policies and procedures in place. And I will say that being a leader is never like a never ending growth, right? We're constantly reading things, trying to find better ways to do things, and then, with all these different generations that are coming through the pipeline, you have to learn how to meet them where they're at, as opposed to trying to make them form in the way that you know you thought you wanted it to be, because that's how you grow as an organization. You have to learn about your team members and your employees and really help them excel, as opposed to mold them and put them inside a box.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Do you think it's an advantage coming from a non-healthcare background, with the role that you have in your own business?

Kristin Berard:

care background with the role that you have in your own business? Yeah, most definitely so. I'm not necessarily thinking about treatment philosophies and those types of things. I let our providers do that. So when we hire a provider, we make sure that their baseline knowledge, understanding and their ultimate goal with patients is that they have this really multidisciplinary approach to it. So we have chiropractic physical therapy, massage therapy, assisted stretching and acupuncture, and then we also manage all of the local schools, athletic training in the area, and so we are not a hospital.

Kristin Berard:

We do not offer all of those extended types of services, but what we do is we offer very similar care and have this cohesive approach to treating patients, just like if you were to go into some sort of professional athletic organization. They don't just have a physical therapist doing everything or just a chiropractor or just a medical doctor doing everything. They have all these different professions that each one of these professionals sees and that's how they excel and are great in their body performs well because they are working together as a team to get the best possible care for their patients, and that, to me, is it's a great thing that the hospitals have, but sometimes I think that gets lost in the mix, and so we're a smaller organization, but we're for the most part. Most of our services are all under one roof, so we rarely have to refer out, unless it's for surgeries or internal types of things. Yeah, Interesting.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

How has your vision for the clinics evolved since you've been involved? What's what's? How do you see things, how things moved and where do you see things going for the business?

Kristin Berard:

So we started with four people and we now have 30 people in our organization in two locations and our locations are relatively close together. What we saw was we had people that were traveling from 45 minutes to an hour away just to come to our clinic and we decided to make it a little bit more accessible because in the chiropractic and physical therapy world, when somebody is injured or they're coming in with a complaint, they need to see the doctor or at least the team, at least two to three times a week, for you know, somewhere between three and six weeks and that makes it very difficult when you're not as accessible for those people. So that's why we expanded. So it's really listening to what the patients need.

Kristin Berard:

But things have really changed as you grow as a business, adding more and more providers.

Kristin Berard:

It's not as intimate as it was when you had four, six, eight, even 10 people. You now have 30 people working with you with 30 different personalities and, like I said before, it's very important to constantly read leadership books, participate in leadership conferences and those types of things, because you gain an appreciation for how to work with all different types of people and then you can disseminate that information to your teams and educate them on how to better work with each other, rather than get frustrated because somebody doesn't know how to do something or doesn't do it your way. And as an only child I'm an only child and my husband is from a family of seven I could say that I have only child syndrome and so I used to think my way is the highway right, like you know, like you can't do it any other way, and I love learning about how to be a better communicator and a better leader, because it not only helps the organization, but it really makes me a better person and it's teaching me to be a better parent as well.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Amazing. Based on what you said, it sounds like there's lots of coffee meetings.

Kristin Berard:

If you've got 30 staff and they have time with you, that's quite a lot of coffee to drink yeah, well, I love coffee, so, um, I was telling somebody I need to buy stock in our local coffee shop over here because that's where they all want to go.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

It's only like two minutes from the office, and so that seems to be the the destination of choice so what are some of the big shifts you're seeing and how people perhaps the younger clients are approaching wellness and recovery? Have there been any shifts? Any shifts since the pandemic even?

Kristin Berard:

You know I will say something that's interesting. So when, before we went into the pandemic, our clinic was open from 7am to 7pm, monday through Thursday and Friday 7am to 5pm from 7am to 7pm, monday through Thursday and Friday 7am to 5pm and when the pandemic hit, we really decreased the amount of hours our massage therapists or acupuncturists anybody that really had that hands on couldn't practice for for quite a while, and so we just kept increasing hours. But what we realized is we didn't need to be open for as many hours to see the same amount of patients, and that was really eye-opening for us because we thought, you know, the more hours that you're open, the more patients you'll be able to treat and help, and it kind of opened our eyes. We have a lot less hours. We have, you know, three long days and then two short days, and so that was nice for the providers because you don't feel like you're expecting too much from them and having them overwork. But also, you know, listening to what the needs of the patients, like. I mean again, I'm constantly listening to what our providers are hearing from the patients and what they need, because ultimately they're only going to come in if you're able to meet their needs.

Kristin Berard:

And so, with the younger generation, I think that one of the biggest things that I'm having to learn. So Jeff is 10 years older than me, so we have a 10-year age gap, and then the majority of our team members are in their mid-20s to early 30s for the most part, so we have a very young organization for the most part early 30s for the most part. So we have a very young organization for the most part, and they're very eager to help people, especially right out of school. You want to help everybody, but there's really this misinformation of how much money can be made with, how much money is is actually being brought in right. So if you want to see, if you don't want to see two people an hour, well then, where are you going to be able to make up that money in the long run in order to make the salary that you want to make? And so we hear a lot of this, this thing called work-life balance, and I have to laugh at that. And I mean I am in my early 40s, don't get me wrong. We have a daughter and a lot going on, but if you were to ask my dad, who is in the car industry for 30 years. He would say what's a work-life balance? You work when they tell you to work and then you balance your home life with whatever time you have left over.

Kristin Berard:

And nowadays it's trying to educate them on if you want to grow, you want to make more money. It's not always make more money, it's, you know, be able to do less with more or more with less. You have to educate them. Do it now. Do it now while you really do have the time, because once you're established in your career, you're going to want to start to slow down. And if you didn't really ramp that up in the beginning and spend extra time getting out in the community, creating a name for yourself, finding that niche market, you know, maybe somebody comes and sees you specifically for one thing, and that's what you're known for. It's. It's going to be a lot more difficult when you got a couple little ones running around and more responsibilities, and it's so, it's.

Kristin Berard:

It's really the mindset more, more or less nowadays, and I I think they're educating these students. You know these chiropractic students and these physical therapy students very well experience and really like trying to do some of those things that I know they want to do on their own, but they don't. They didn't quite learn what they need to learn. So I have a frustration with the education system right now. I think we're doing a little too much sitting in the classroom and less, you know, getting hands on and learning that way. So maybe we'll see a shift in the next couple five, 10 years. With, with you know, more people are going into the trades industry because they're realizing how expensive going to school is. We don't want to. We don't want to lose good providers because school is way too expensive and they'll be in debt, you know, up to their ears until they're 50.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

way too expensive and they'll be in debt, you know, up to their ears, until they're 50. What about your clients, your patients, in terms of the way they approach wellness and recovery? Are they more? Are people more proactive in terms of proactive or reactive? They wait for an injury to happen or something to happen, or do we have this preventative streak running through, where people actually want to keep themselves well in, in good physical shape, making sure there are no sort of imbalances or MSK problems, or is it still?

Dr Andrew Greenland:

very much a reactive kind of picture that you see.

Kristin Berard:

So I see two different things. There is this proactive side of things, where it's more of the younger generation. To be honest with you, I think some of the you know 40s on up are starting to understand that they need to be more proactive than reactive. But also the education and how to be proactive, in my opinion, is misinformation, because we have social media and all of these things, with people that aren't actually educated in that industry trying to push information that really isn't 100% accurate, and so you have to be careful in how you address those things with patients that are asking those questions because maybe they watched a YouTube video or an Instagram reel about something and that's where they learn their information from. And, god forbid, we use Google for everything. So, dr, google has an answer for everything, right, but in our clinic, we really push our providers to educate the patient on just because you feel pain right now and we get rid of the pain doesn't mean the problem is gone, and it's educating them that first we're going to get you out of pain, but then we're going to teach you how to create that long term healing process where maybe you got out of pain temporarily and then you stopped coming and finishing out your treatment plan and then six weeks later, a month later, you you do it again. And so if you finish out that treatment plan, you're not only getting out of pain but you're preventing yourself from getting injured again in the future.

Kristin Berard:

And so, unfortunately, insurance companies don't cover maintenance care and preventative care.

Kristin Berard:

They only cover care when somebody is hurt, sick, injured or needs surgery, and this is where I'm hoping that the insurance company can shift focus in applauding the people who are more apt to do preventative care and maintenance care, because that's actually what's going to save the insurance company's money long term, with way less surgeries.

Kristin Berard:

And when people are active and they're you know they're active, they're eating better they're getting the advice from the professionals rather than watching YouTube for everything and asking Google for their answer. I think that we're going to start to see a much healthier population of people, I mean especially in America, and, to be honest with you, we travel all over the world and America is not that healthy and for the most part, compared to some of these other parts of the world, and so I definitely think we are way behind where we should be, and we have more resources resources than most of the world. So I think it's just a mind shift. We just, we just need to shift the minds of everybody and not keep lining the pockets of the people that are helping us get better.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

I couldn't agree more. I mean, preventative medicine is quite a hard sell in the UK. So we have a health service and I do functional medicine privately. But I'm basically seeing people reacting. They're having, they have a problem, they have a clinical problem condition, complex illnesses, and you see them at that point, not when they're well and trying to keep themselves out of trouble. So I'm always for preventative medicine but I always find it's quite a hard sell, even if you take the money out of the equation. But that's just a new experience.

Kristin Berard:

So you know, I think it's, I think the mindset. Really, unfortunately, it comes from something negative that happens in someone's life. Typically, they're not proactive, for the most part, trying to prevent something because they have no clue what could happen. It's usually those people who something happened Maybe they had a heart attack or they you know, we get these power lifters. They had a heart attack or they, you know, we get these power lifters.

Kristin Berard:

I mean, I used to be a bodybuilder and I know that I definitely wasn't doing my body any good back then, but my mom died when I was four and so I think about if I can be the healthiest person I can be within reason. I mean, I do enjoy going out to eat every once in a while. I'm very active at least five to six days a week, but I know that I'm doing the best that I possibly can and I'm not putting that on somebody else. It's not somebody else's responsibility to keep me healthy. It's my responsibility to keep me healthy. And I think what we're seeing is is people are really starting to notice that their families, their friends, they're something's happening to people and they're starting to realize, wow, maybe I need to make a shift in in the way that I approach life, and do I want to be in pain later in life, or do I want to just put forth the effort now so that I'm much better off in the future?

Dr Andrew Greenland:

agreed. So what's what's going really well in the business for you lately? Is any particular sort of service or thing that you've developed, um, you know, from the point of view of a ceo, anything perhaps that you've doubled down on because it's going well, just interested, what's working?

Kristin Berard:

yeah. So we come across a lot of either chiropractors or physical therapists that are looking to expand their services, because, uh, typically in those industries, especially physical therapy, you'll get people in because they have an injury. They come for 10, 12, 14 weeks with treatment and then you don't ever see them again until they're injured again. And so what we've really done over the past I would say six to eight years is look at the services that we offer and think about ways we can supplement post-rehab or post-treatment care. And so massage does really good who doesn't love a good massage? But recently Jeff had this really great idea. He'd been stretching a lot of his patients his whole entire life through his chiropractic treatments and he was stretching for a really long time with his patients. And so what was happening is he was growing with patient volume and people were constantly coming in to see because they were getting better, and so him doing the services himself just was taking up so much time. And so about two and a half years ago we launched a pilot program called the Stretch Center, and it's an assisted stretch program and we teach businesses how to integrate assisted stretch into their existing business. So it gives a physical therapist a reason to maybe recommend assisted stretching to their patients after they're done with their treatment plans. So they're they're continually engaging and then if something does happen to them in the future, they know where to come back to. Same thing with the chiropractic side of things. We will educate them in how important stretching is. Assisted stretching is great because usually the assisted stretching is you just lie on the table, somebody stretches you based on the things that you need, maybe where you're tight or whatever. You know we have desk jobs, we have active jobs. People are constantly in pain, but maybe it doesn't constitute getting on another treatment plan. So that's a really good preventative and proactive approach to things.

Kristin Berard:

And we launched that publicly, nationally and internationally in the last six months and it's going great because assisted stretching is a business on its own and especially in the United States we've seen a lot of franchises pop up, like Stretch Zone, stretch Lab, and they're great right, but it's just one service and if our busy people I mean everybody is really busy and they're limited on time If you can go to one location for all these different services, it's just a really good addition to an existing business. And so we've embraced that and we do continuing education for personal trainers and massage therapists and all different types of hands-on providers online. But we also do in-person training. And then we have this license, which is not a franchise, so you're not stuck doing something that maybe you're committing to like 10 years down the road and it's got a huge investment. So it's a very low barrier of entry and we're loving it.

Kristin Berard:

It's it's kind of shifting our mentality and kind of getting this service out across the world. And you know, somebody, even like you could add assisted stretching to their existing business and it's a good revenue income. It's a good way to retain clients. And then we also, for those who are looking to increase their new patient base, we teach them how to get out into the community and engage in that community and different ways to kind of increase the community's knowledge in what you do.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Brilliant and, on the other end, is there anything that's a consistent challenge? Obviously, you're in this sort of CEO seat, whether that's operationally staff or, from a growth standpoint, anything that challenges the business for you at the moment.

Kristin Berard:

Yeah, I would say our two biggest things is we live in a small town, so getting people here we live in a town of 40 to 50,000 people, so it's getting people to want to move to our area. And then not only getting the right people to move to our area, those people have to kind of operate in the way that our location operates. So we're more sports rehab focused. So to bring somebody in who typically would treat like a Medicare, inpatient type of care, it just doesn't. It doesn't work with our specific demographics and so it's not only finding the right fit but just finding someone in general, which is a very difficult thing sometimes when you're in a smaller area.

Kristin Berard:

So we do have some of those challenges, but I would say the biggest challenge in 2024 2025, at the given moment is the healthcare industry is now dictating how we treat patients, as opposed to allowing our providers to use the knowledge that they learned in school and through their continuing education, and they're not covering services that we know these patients need.

Kristin Berard:

And it's very, very difficult to explain that to a patient who has health insurance, because they think, because I have health insurance, it should cover my pain and unfortunately, these insurance companies are saying, no, we're not going to cover it, or we'll cover it, but we're going to pay you cents for you know, on the dollar, to do that service, and and so it's very difficult because you're trying to bring in great providers and pay them what they're worth, and then you have these insurance companies that aren't paying the organization for the work that they're doing, and so I'm I'm really hoping that we see a shift in, and I have to imagine that this is a global issue, but it's just. It's very sad when you have large corporations dictating how people should be getting care, rather than allowing the doctors who spent 8, 10, 12 years in school provide the care that they learned how to do. So from an administrative aspect, it's just frustrating to see our providers who are very frustrated.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Yeah, conflicted. It must be very frustrating it is this repertoire of skills and techniques and you're stuck with not being able to give the patient the benefit of that knowledge and expertise. I get it. I completely get it.

Kristin Berard:

Yeah, so we're starting to shift the mindset of our providers to now operate more 50-50, with 50% insurance base, 50% cash base. So thinking about what could work with the services that we offer that patients would be willing to pay cash for because they know it's benefiting them in the long run. And so that will only be successful if the providers educate the patients enough in why these services are beneficial for them. And so it's spending the time on the front end with your providers educating them and how to educate the patients, and then the profit and the income boost for your providers will come after they start implementing a lot of these things.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Got it. So, in the CEO role, are there any sort of metrics that you particularly keep an eye out for in your business, or any that you're laser focused on improving right now? I guess you have certain things that you look at to kind of gauge the health of the business. What might those things be?

Kristin Berard:

Yeah. So what's really funny is I love numbers and I love to keep track of stats, because numbers don't lie, and so we focus on reviews. Those are really important, making sure that the business is getting good, positive feedback from the patients, because nowadays when people are going online and looking for help in something or another, they want to know what other people think of that specific location, and so they're reading all of these reviews. So reviews is really important. And then also we keep track of patient visit average. So if a specific condition typically would require somebody to come in, on average and in the general world of physical therapy, for instance, 12 visits seems to be an average You'll get people that only need like eight or nine visits and then you'll get some people who need 15 or 16 visits.

Kristin Berard:

So keeping track of the patient visit average is a huge indicator in how well our providers are educating the patients and also if they're helping the patient, because the patient's only going to keep coming back if they feel like they're being helped. So that is definitely a really important key performance indicator for us. And then we keep track of some other things, like how many new patients, how many reactivations, so somebody who was once a patient who comes back. And then also we have to keep track of collection percentage, because we're not only cash, we are insurance and cash and so we have to make sure we're collecting based on what our expectations are. So there's a lot of follow-up that goes with that, but really the patient visit average is important for providers.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Good and I like the fact that some of those are sort of quality related, which is really important. In the business that you run, you know the reviews and the returns and everything. I think that's that's really important, not just the financial numbers but the quality metrics. So where do you see the business in the next six to twelve months, or where do you want the business to be in the next six to twelve months? I guess you have a kind of a growth plan or a long-term strategy. Um, we've got two clinics, 30 providers. Where's next?

Kristin Berard:

So right now we're really honing in on trying to understand what the insurance companies are allowing us to do Because, like I said, we're really trying to shift more to a 50-50 clinic and that's kind of the direction that I think a lot of non-hospital privately owned clinics are starting to shift to. And so over the next six months, I would say, is to really understand what services we can provide to the patients that are cash-based, that are going to go along with preventative care, maintenance care, and then also some of those people that are having a hard time getting things covered that may need help with a current issue. But we're trying to fill what I call the circle within our organization and we offer the chiropractic side of things and we offer the physical therapy side of things, but some of the things that we don't offer and we refer out a lot to are more orthopedic base. So maybe like injections, like pain injections, those types of things, and that's just kind of a piece of the puzzle that we've never really had in our organization. And so we see a an opportunity to bring in like a physician assistant, md, do or a nurse practitioner to be able to offer those services to our patients so that they're still all under one roof and all of our providers are able to communicate with each other, because when you have, like, somebody going to see a chiropractor somewhere else and a physical therapist somewhere else, and maybe they're going to someone for pain management or whatever it may be, those doctors don't typically communicate with each other, and so it's not that they don't want what's best for the patient.

Kristin Berard:

Providers are busy, so constantly communicating with other providers is very difficult. So if you can be all in one roof, under one roof, it's really really important. Plus, we have meetings every single week where our providers communicate with each other about different cases that are going on and other things that they're hearing from patients, and when you're under one roof, it is really helpful. The patients constantly see this, notice it, and then they comment on these things, and so I will say that that is the biggest thing. That has set us apart in our community is that we are a one-stop shop for most things, and people love that brilliant final questions.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

I know you've got a team meeting to go to, but if you could solve one major challenge in the business today that would unlock your business to the next level. What would it be? Maybe it it's the insurance thing, I don't know. Or maybe it's something else.

Kristin Berard:

Allowing the doctors to form treatment plans that they know the patients need and at least having the insurance company help, rather than give all this pushback, because it's not helping the patients get better right now and it's frustrating the providers and I'm I'm really worried about, you know, the next 5, 10, 15 years. If we don't make a shift. I'm worried that it's going to burn out a lot of our providers and nobody is going to want to be in the healthcare industry anymore because they're not able to do what they really wanted to do when they decided to go into the healthcare profession. And that's help people get better.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Amazing. Kristen, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate this fantastic conversation really open, honest, really give us some insights into your business and your kind of thought process into driving this brilliant business that you have forward. So really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

Kristin Berard:

Anybody who wants to reach out to Kristen.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

We'll put your details on the bio page if anyone wants to reach out or check your socials. But thank you once again. Really appreciate your time today.

Kristin Berard:

Yes, thank you so much.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Thank you, just stop recording.