Welcome welcome, Medicine Mavens! We’re so happy to have you back with us today.
As physicians, we’re often used to limiting ourselves and the care we provide by focusing solely on direct patient care. But, as an entrepreneur, you want your healthcare practice reach to go beyond the status quo. You want to make a change. You want to reach underserved communities in a way traditional hospital care has been known to.
In today’s episode of the Funding Your Health Care Practice podcast Dr. Omolara is expanding upon last week’s episode and sharing with you partnered strategies that can help you build upon the work you are already doing in your mission-driven healthcare practice by ensuring you have the funding you need to grow your practice and giving you the ability to create the impact you want to have within your community.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
This is another episode chock full of information, so be sure to take notes and reach out to us with any questions you may have.
Find the show notes at: https://bit.ly/episodethreeshownotes
Read the transcript for this episode at: https://bit.ly/seasonthreeepisodethree
Send Dr. Omolara a voice message at the link below, whether you have a question about funding a mission-driven health practice or a response to this episode. She'll answer your question on air!
Send a voice message: https://melaninandmedicine.co/messages
Submit an intake form: https://bit.ly/mmpracticeintakeform
Resources: bit.ly/melaninandmedicine
Our website: melaninandmedicine.co
Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast and tell us your key takeaways!
CONNECT WITH US!
Welcome welcome, Medicine Mavens! We’re so happy to have you back with us today.
As physicians, we’re often used to limiting ourselves and the care we provide by focusing solely on direct patient care. But, as an entrepreneur, you want your healthcare practice reach to go beyond the status quo. You want to make a change. You want to reach underserved communities in a way traditional hospital care has been known to.
In today’s episode of the Funding Your Health Care Practice podcast Dr. Omolara is expanding upon last week’s episode and sharing with you partnered strategies that can help you build upon the work you are already doing in your mission-driven healthcare practice by ensuring you have the funding you need to grow your practice and giving you the ability to create the impact you want to have within your community.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
This is another episode chock full of information, so be sure to take notes and reach out to us with any questions you may have.
Find the show notes at: https://bit.ly/episodethreeshownotes
Read the transcript for this episode at: https://bit.ly/seasonthreeepisodethree
Send Dr. Omolara a voice message at the link below, whether you have a question about funding a mission-driven health practice or a response to this episode. She'll answer your question on air!
Send a voice message: https://melaninandmedicine.co/messages
Submit an intake form: https://bit.ly/mmpracticeintakeform
Resources: bit.ly/melaninandmedicine
Our website: melaninandmedicine.co
Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast and tell us your key takeaways!
CONNECT WITH US!
S03E03 Full [TRANSCRIPT]
INTRO
[00:00:00] Partnerships can be really helpful. Not only for the funding piece, but really for the impact and, and making long-lasting change. However, I really do believe that is the only way that we make substantial, like impactful, long-lasting changes
Funding is not adjunct. It is the , the core, the lifeblood of making sure that we're not solely limiting ourselves and limiting the care that we can provide by just solely focusing on, okay, we can only get funding in by what we generate as a business.
And, what I mean by that is what we generate through just direct patient care, And, not through partnerships that allow for a more expanded level of care.
EPISODE
[00:01:00] Hello, hello, hello and welcome back. How are you all? We are doing a series, so it's part two today, so hopefully you went [00:02:00] back to part one.I'm super excited to be able to talk about today's topic because we are talking about finding funding sources for your healthcare organization, but today we're talking about partnered sources. And this is fun because this is my jam. This is what we actually created a whole company to do, . So it is very close to, you know, close to my heart in terms of thinking about how we can use partnerships to both help us achieve the impact we want, but also, Ensure that we have the income we need to continue and sustain.
So before I was gonna say, welcome back to how to Stop Trying to grow your healthcare organization by robbing Peter to pay Paul, but I figured that was a little too much, little too heavy handed. So we're gonna stick with finding funding sources, , but otherwise, wanted to just thank you all for the listening, especially as we just [00:03:00] restart and revamp, and y'all have been coming in full force.
Thank you to those of you who are sharing the podcast with healthcare organizations, with healthcare entrepreneurs who are all trying to do the same thing we're always trying to do, which is stay af. Have the money so we can do the work that we know that we're called to do. So that's my mission. Last week we talked a lot, a lot of different funding sources. Most of those could be actually attained on your own right as an organization. Those are ones that you can go to and present yourself as a solo. Organization and you have the capacity to be able to secure those dollars. However, that's no fun.
Right? Okay. Maybe it's fun for some of you, and I am a high introvert Enneagram five, like I like doing things alone. I like being alone, but not when it comes to my healthcare [00:04:00] organizations and my healthcare companies, and. I'm gonna talk about three ways, okay? Three ways that you can get money, right, for your healthcare organization.
But here is the rub. It requires partnership. Now, this may be a no-go non-negotiable for some of you, because in healthcare we're often very egocentric. In healthcare, we are told. The sun rises and the moon sets in healthcare in terms of bringing people's, you know, health outcomes to life. Right? It is us who alone have the answer and what we are aware of.
We were brutally shaken when information came out about social determinants of health. Now this is. New information to many of us. Many of us who've been working with under-resourced populations already [00:05:00] knew that this asthma treatment is not gonna do anything unless we talked, unless we try to figure out what's happening inside of the house, right?
We knew this, but we needed some data to back us up, and it was not pretty healthcare because it came out clinical care is only 20% through health outcomes only contributes to 20% and 80% is everything else. So when I'm balancing those odds, I'm saying to myself, y'all, in order to actually improve the health and wellbeing of people, I'm, I'm a niece and partners cuz us providing clinical care alone ain't gonna do it.
So that is, I think, One of the like, hardcore reasons why I partnered partner partnerships can be really helpful. Not only for the funding piece, but really for the impact and, and making long-lasting change. However, I think it's also just, I really do believe that that is on the only [00:06:00] way that we make su substantial, like impactful, long-lasting changes rather.
you know, little blips in the bucket, right? And that we're able to create a new infrastructure for our patients. And so I do want to stress the fact that this is particularly important and near and dear to my heart, and those of you who are feeling like, oh, I'm connecting with that. I got you. I see you. I see you.
Okay. So we're gonna talk about one to three, and I'm actually going. Do it. All of these three, just so you know, we employ in strong children, wellness. We have done, we are a cap currently doing, I will tell you, every month we're kind of like, okay, what, you know, what grant, what contract, what apm, and I'll tell you what APM is.
What are we doing different, what are we gonna do and what are we going to. that funding is not adjunct. It is like the , the core, the lifeblood of [00:07:00] making sure that we're not solely limiting ourselves and limiting the care that we can provide by just solely focusing on, okay, we can only get funding in by what we generate as a business.
And what I mean by that is what we generate through just direct patient care, okay? And not through partnerships that allow for a more expanded level of care. So let's get into it. Number one is integrated care. This is not new to many of you. Integrated care is something that, you know, ultimately.
when we think about, a lot of times the, the referral hellhole that exists inside of healthcare where you find something and then you're like, oh, but they need this too. And then you have to. Do a referral, cross your fingers, little prayer and hope that that person gets to where they need to get, because you are not really gonna see the outcome you want for the patient unless that happens too, [00:08:00] right?
And integrated care kind of says to us, Hey, why don't we just put everything in one space so that then we don't, we know that people can access the other levers that are needed for their better health outcomes. So the goal of this is that we believe that because this allows for more timeliness of care, it can keep more people out of the hospital.
Okay. Costly hospital, costly ER visits. And many states are providing what we call alternative payment models because the insurance companies are like, it looks like if we are able to do two rather than one thing inside of the. Maybe even three things inside of the, the practice or inside of the, your healthcare organization.
Instead of that one thing of physical health or one thing of mental health this actually reduces the likelihood that this person's gonna spend a lot of money in the ER or on a [00:09:00] hospitalization. So alternative payment models will pay every month something what we call capitated. So some of you are deep entrenched.
you know, this is going to be a refresher. Okay? Not, and I'm not going deep into this. We do that more inside of m and m if we need to, if we feel like you're a candidate for this and we need to bring in those dollars for as a superficial layer, basically you are getting, in addition to what we usually see, which is somebody, you provide a service, you get reimbursed, or you have them pay.
for something in capitated, it means that you get paid per member per month who is in your ecosystem. And the goal is because we have found out that a lot of the things that work don't happen during the encounter, but in the follow up in how we are communicating with the family, what we're doing in the interim after the encount, and we want to be able to get paid [00:10:00] to do that.
So we have the staff, we have everything that we need, so you actually get paid per member per month in addition to the service that you provide, to cover all of those things that you have in your healthcare organizations. that support that family. So when we talk about integrated care, you can see social care management.
So social care is like what your social worker would do or what they call now care manager and addressing all of the other needs that might happen and potentially bring somebody in, right? So if they copay was too high, is someone following up to see kind of what we can do about that? If they're having a housing.
is that going to affect them? Refrigerating their insulin, so the social care and maybe a mental health healthcare provider. And so that's a behavioral health person who identifies, oh, there are a bunch of these social issues that are exacerbating my, my my client who is now feeling anxious or [00:11:00] depressed because of these other social.
Let's have both of these things addressed in this same area, right? So I don't have to send you all the way to d s s Department of Social Services or the housing department, but I have someone here who can help support you through that or mental and physical health, that is very common. We're seeing where physical health care is now either bringing a mental health provider.
So if you're a mental health provider, are you actually. Coming, going to phy, going to primary care practices and seeing is there an opportunity in your state where if you. Collaborate, there can be a per member per month payment that you guys can split. Or the Grand Puba, I like to call it, of integrated care, which is addressing social care, mental care, and your physical healthcare, right?
All in one. That is what we employ at Strong Children Wellness. You know, I'm very. But [00:12:00] it is a huge undertaking to be able to have the diverse team to do that. But there are entities within different states that once again, provide a significant per member per month because you are partnering and that can look like partnering with another organization to provide those services.
It can also look like you part just starting to build out your services, but really it does at some level require partnership because it would be very arrogant to think that you could provide every service at the highest level, right? So if a housing nonprofit really can do this, it'd be very arrogant to say it.
No, no, no. We can figure out the housing on our own. And it's like, , really this is what they do, so why aren't you partnering? So those are the kind of in the ways that we can use partnerships to be able to support and then also [00:13:00] have innovative ways of when we get that payment to be able to split it so that everyone wins or providing a certain contracted amount of money for.
And we'll go straight into number two, which is contracts, a contracted amount of money to all of your partner organization. So that they are being paid for their time in terms of trying to bring all of these services together in under one roof or making sure that it's very streamlined through the partnership, so you not looking for referrals, you know exactly where to send them.
All right. The second one is contracts. So contract. You know, contracts are contracts, right? This is not new. People contract other people. And you know, you might have a bunch of contractors who I hope are part-time W two employees, so that, you know, in a healthcare organization, Not good forum to have an independent contractor.
Okay. But we can talk about that [00:14:00] later and what some of the missteps might be around that. But anyway, I digress. So contracts really refer to identifying potentially who needs your healthcare services. To meet requirements of their own. So how this came up most importantly was thinking about like headstart.
Headstart, for many of you who are in the pediatric space, know that that is an early childhood program, specifically with low income families. where they provide education and just support over overall wraparound support. The thing about is you can't get into Headstart unless you have a recent physical and some dental care going on, and that needs to be done regularly in order for you to keep staying in Headstart.
Right. And a lot of the bottlenecks for a lot of families was actually being able to. that care available to them, you know, to be able to get into it. So [00:15:00] bottlenecks were that the, the organization was like, go get this from your physician. And the physician, they couldn't find, get an appointment, they couldn't do all that.
So a lot of the, the, you know, when I was thinking about this, one of our head starts was like, look, we can do a physical at your site, . Okay. And that became kind of annis for us to. , oh, we can bring healthcare into these organizations that aren't traditional healthcare spaces. one of the nice things about this is that the organization who potentially wants to contract your healthcare organization, so the.
maybe not. the non-healthcare organization that wants to bring you in you need to be resolving a pain point. for example, foster care agencies, So foster care agencies need to have physicals done for their foster kids within a certain time period.
So making sure that they can have somebody integrated on site who can do that. Makes a world of [00:16:00] difference. It saves the time for their staff of looking and finding and following up and trying to figure out all of those things so the staff can actually do more work and provide or reach more families, I should say, and provide more higher quality of care instead of likes staying on the phone trying to figure out things.
And so you wanna think about places like long. You know, inpatient facilities that might be for other things like behavioral health or trauma or, you know, rehabilitation and do, would they need a physical health, right. Or the, or the opposite where you have someone who's providing physical health long term, but they need a mental health assessment,
In order for that patient to be able to leave or. , those who are experiencing trauma and the need to be able to consolidate care if an organization because a lot of times that may be a barrier to them being able to su succinctly and concisely, find [00:17:00] care without like all of the. , all of the problems that may ensue because of their home life and issues and then, or home-based care.
I think about visiting nurse and a lot of times them doing a lot of referrals out, and if they were able to. know that a home, someone could come to the home and actually provide that care that they usually have to refer out, that is really attractive, right? It saves time for the nurses of like not having to figure out, oh, is this person gonna be seen?
Did they get seen? Let me follow up all of that. So this kind of contracted piece where you can have your organization actually paid to provide services or outsource your services. So usually that contract can. Paying for a staff member to be on site at that place or to do that work. Plus whatever else is needed.
That is extremely important. And so we have two subcontracts and structural. I told you, we, we just, you know, I'm just sharing, I'm [00:18:00] sharing kind of some of the things that allow for us to be able to have a practice where we can spend 30 minutes or 45 minutes with a patient rather than the 15 minute factory. because we just have been diverse about what are the different ways that we can bring revenue in. So the third one is grants. Now if y'all know me, . Okay. I am. I'm a lover of grants and I think it's. imagination inside of me piece. It's my favorite cuz I've been writing, grants. For over 20 years. My first one I wrote when I was like 19 to basically get funding to do a research project in Kenya. And I got it and, and I was able to go to Kenya and implement the project. And you know, I think from then on the idea of having something in my. , making it [00:19:00] 2D, and then being able to bring people in and convince them that this is amazing and that they should allow for this to become 3d. That always takes my breath away. Every single time
Hey visionaries, do you have a question about funding? Have you been struggling to get your social justice healthcare practice to a point of growth? Do you want guidance on how to create partnerships when grants or position your practice for hundreds of thousands in funding from for-profit and non-profit funders?
If so, we wanna hear from you.
Now. You can leave Dr. Alara voice message with all of your funding questions@melaninandmedicine.co slash messages. Dr. Alara is an expert grant strategist and can teach you the strategies that one, her healthcare practice, strong children wellness. Over $700,000 in funding. These are the same strategies she teaches clients in our melatonin [00:20:00] medicine courses and workshops. We've ve opened up the lines to allow you access to all of the funding secrets and strategies that will allow you to take your healthcare practice from struggle to success and allow you to give much needed care to our communities.
So leave us a message@melaninandmedicine.co slash messages. That's melanin and medicine.co/messages. Dr. Alara will be sure to read your question on air and give you the answers you've been searching for.
That always takes my breath away. Every single Every single time a grant's given, an angel gets its wings . But I do think that, because I think that a lot of us really. one of the beautiful things about either writing grants and, and, and the work that we do and teach, you don't have to actually write the grant, but you have to have a good synopsis of what actually is entailed and what you want to do.
But [00:21:00] the actual skills of writing a grant can be with your partner organization, which I'll share in a second. But I do think it's so when you're looking for funding, it just strengthens your business so much. now that you have to bring somebody else along to believe what you're doing. You have to check and look under the hood and be like, okay, does that make.
Does that make sense? Wait, okay, we're gonna do that and this is how much it would cost. And you're doing all of these things that I will have to be frank, that a lot of entrepreneurs don't do in the beginning. They're not thinking about what are the budgets, they're not thinking about what are going to be the expenses and how much actually is going to come out.
They're not thinking about how it's gonna sustain over time, which are all little nuggets that need to be explained in a grant, right? Or in. . I enjoy that part because I think it now makes this instead of just something that I'm thinking of doing, it makes it real. Like, it's like, [00:22:00] okay, yeah, we've check, check, check.
This is how we've thought about, this is how much it's gonna cost. And it allows for you to be able to now even if you don't get that grant, that one, you are able to now say, okay, but now we have a well-oiled machine in terms of what this needs to look like. . It's addictive, y'all. It's addictive.
Because once you get your first one, you're like, oh, okay. I just, I just had to, okay. All right. Right. And ultimately, of course you have to implement what you said you were gonna do. Let's not forget that part. But it's just the idea of, I think for many of us, really. Saying to ourselves, this is what I think things should look like.
And being able to provide exactly how that would work and being able to reallocate the resources that need to come back to our communities, right. And not, and knowing that it exists out there and being able to just like pull it back in. I think all of that. So I'm gonna get [00:23:00] off of my platform. Okay. I'm just gonna talk a little bit about this.
One of the things about the grants, cause a lot of, you're like, well, I'm not a nonprofit health organization. And Yeah, definitely we do consulting for FQHCs and other nonprofit health organizations that are much larger in terms of how to expand their revenue and their reach. . But for smaller healthcare organizations and practices that are for-profit, this really only does work for those that can connect themselves to a social mission.
So if you're a for-profit social enterprise, and what does that look like? It looks like can your pos, can your practice and the services it provides be positioned to address a social problem? And that usually falls under kind of four things. One is AC access to health so that could look like immigrants, low income individuals.
it can look like any of those specific buckets of people who are often marginalized out [00:24:00] of care. And does your service actually bring them basic levels of care or or heighten the quality of the care that they're used to. We like to think that our organization does all.
The second could be issues that, needs to be a solution cuz everybody has them, right? So it could be the hypertension, diabetes it could be mental health and how your organization is uniquely addressing that issue. how you're going above and beyond what traditionally.
Be what's employed to, to care for those people. What are you doing differently? The third thing is actually addressing the workforce. there are more grants now more than ever to figure out how do we maintain the health workforce? How do we increase it? How do we make it safer?
for the, the people who are providing care so this is actually a place where grants could be given to consulting organizations as well because of that part. And so you'll [00:25:00] have a nonprofit who you would partner with who would get the grant funding and they would subcontract your services to actually deliver that need to the population of interest, which could be their employees.
Maybe it's a collaborative of a bunch of different organizations. And the fourth is providing solutions to s d H issues. So social de determinant of health issues, so housing, food, legal immigration. What you'd wanna do is say how you are working with community partners who already provide those services, but streamlining the access to those services for people who are in their organization.
So, for example, Immigration law organization who's a nonprofit, can they now when their patients and they screen for unmet medical needs and get their patients care through your organization, if you are a physical health provider, . Right? And so these kind of partnered solutions are really the innovation where [00:26:00] grants can allow for you to create something completely different.
Many of you know, our business started with getting our first grant, a $125,000 grant because we didn't have capital and we were not about the loan life in the beginning because we, we know where that ends up. We we're all, all three of our co-founders were doctors, right? So, very familiar with. , we'd like to limit that
So, so it was just a very important place for us to be in, in terms of, you know, being able to write it, envision, envision it first, being able to clarify it together, write it, and then get the funding to actually implement it. But through working with a nonprofit, so that nonprofit partner being like, yes, we want, we wanna bring these services into our organization community that we.
and yes, we'd like to get this grant to this funder and then subcon path in there, the amount of money that you need to [00:27:00] actually to, to deliver the services. So, . It does require working with a 5 0 1 organization. You're the subcontractor. You're going to add your services. Usually the goal is that 5 0 1 organization has the resources you wanna work with.
Someone established has the resources to be able to write the grant, but needs your help in. actually putting together what the service looks like. And so that's actually one of the things that we do. we also help with, like putting together that document that then you can deliver to multiple different organizations.
we teach all of these models just in case, you know, but I think most importantly, I wanna expand your mind outside of just loans and equity and really getting creative, especially if your solutions are focused on. , what is it that we can do for communities and social mission work? So summary, we talked about three different ways that we can partner, so integrated care to [00:28:00] hopefully bring in some alternative payment models like those capitated per member per month, right?
Models to supple. The the payments that we usually receive for just providing services. We talked about outsourcing your own care providers, so being able to work with organizations who need physical health or need mental health, and you being able to create contracts where you can hire someone to be able to provide those services on site or within their organization.
And then we talked about expanding care to under. Communities or partnering with community partners that address social issues so that you all can collaborate and be able to get grant dollars that way for innovative work. So that's it. I hope that this was helpful. I'm trying to stay under 30 minutes, y'all.
, I hope that this was good otherwise I'm really excited for those of you who are like, oh, aha. And if you do have an [00:29:00] aha and you are an established practice already, like you're working, but you're like, I need to expand this, this process might close or I'm not getting the cash flow that I need,
Talk to us. Let us know. You can always go to our quick links, which is Bitly bt ly slash melanin and a n d medicine, so you can always go there. Check out our resources. Of course, we have the podcast here for you. otherwise I'd love to get questions. melanin and medicine.co/messages. You can literally leave me a voice message with your question.
we are going to answer it on air. So I hope that this makes sense to you. I'm super excited and yeah, I hope that you feel reinvigorated about finding funding. And remember, just go to bit leave, submit an intake.
If you're a larger organization and you want support, we do have consulting services. So either way. Have a good rest of your week [00:30:00] and remember, Stay funded. Get funding. Get to work and get funding. Talk to you next week. Bye.
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