Post-traumatic doctor disorder: Jenna Richardson on building Princeton Integrative Health with her father

0:26Sami Haider She worked in business for almost 20 years, then a health scare in her family changed everything. So she started a practice with her dad. Welcome to Founders in Practice. I talk with the people who build great private practices. I'm your host, Sami Haider. My guest today is Jenna Richardson. She is the co-founder of Princeton Integrative Health in New Jersey. She started it in 2017 with her father, Dr. Vincent Leonti. Jenna, welcome to the show.

0:52Jenna Richardson Thank you.

0:53Sami Haider Take me back. You were pre-med at Cornell, then you went into business for almost 20 years. What happened?

1:00Jenna Richardson Well, I grew up as the daughter of two medical professionals. My father's a doctor, my mother's a registered nurse, and I excelled in math and science. So it was just always assumed that I was going to go to school to be a doctor. I didn't know anything different until my first semester at Cornell, where I realized that I couldn't stand the sight of blood or the smell of formaldehyde, and I got a D-minus in Chem 101. So I was like, maybe this is not my path. I tried to figure out what the next steps were and ended up falling into the world of business, management consulting and enterprise technology, and did that for a good 15 years.

1:38Sami Haider Take me back to the moment you knew you had to start a practice.

1:42Jenna Richardson The moment I knew I had to start a practice came when I was already about 15 years into my career. I was working in management consulting, helping to diagnose root cause issues for large healthcare organizations. My son had just been born. He might have been about five or six months old at the time, and he developed some health challenges. We went through what I now call the revolving door of healthcare, and we just weren't getting the answers that we were seeking. Some doctors were telling me that I was crazy, in not so many words. Others just weren't entertaining what was going on. It wasn't anything super severe or complex, but in my heart, in my mother's instinct, I knew that there was something going on. Long story short, we ended up in the office of a doctor who prescribed a medication that could have caused respiratory failure for my son at six months old. So with my management consulting hat on, I was like, okay, why am I diagnosing root cause issues to help these healthcare organizations make more money, when the healthcare system is not looking at my son from a whole person perspective and trying to figure out the root cause? They're just prescribing a medication. That was when I dove down the rabbit hole of functional and integrative medicine, fell in love with it, and felt that we had to bring it to the world.

3:05Sami Haider Beautiful. Then you asked your dad to start it with you. What did he say?

3:12Jenna Richardson My dad's always been very open-minded. He was in conventional medicine, in the emergency room, for about 25 years at that point, and he had been in general practice for about 10. I started talking with both my parents about what I was learning about food as medicine, the supplementation that our bodies need, and the value of sunlight and movement, all of these kind of abstract concepts in the conventional medical world. And he said, this sounds interesting, let me find something that I can go and study. So he found the Institute for Functional Medicine and went to their week-long intensive. He came out of there and said, "After practicing medicine for over 30 years, I finally feel like I have tools to help people get well and not just keep them sick." From that moment on, we began to conceptualize what Princeton Integrative Health is now, and we have really never looked back.

4:12Sami Haider Amazing. Your title is Chief Energy Officer. I love that. What does it mean?

4:19Jenna Richardson I just feel like energy is everything. How we show up in the world, how we lead ourselves, and how that ripples out to others, whether that's our kids or our colleagues. It's a leadership term I came up with because I didn't like Chief Executive Officer. Occasionally I'll call myself the Chief Everything Officer, but I prefer Chief Energy Officer. I just think it's important from a leadership perspective.

4:48Sami Haider I love that. So what did business teach you that most doctors never learn?

4:55Jenna Richardson Oh gosh. Well, I always say they don't teach business in medical school. It's unfortunate. It's been such an amazing partnership. My father and I are very different people. He approaches things very cautiously and conscientiously, which is a great balance to me, because I'm a go-for-it, driven, impulsive risk taker. Business taught me the value of a solid infrastructure within an organization. It's one thing to show up and practice medicine. It's another thing to create an environment and infrastructure to support a practice that can do that in service of many hundreds or thousands of people. So it's been a perfect relationship for us to grow and build. I've also done some consulting work for other integrative docs on practice development and growth: economies of scale, efficiencies, effectiveness, productivity, growth, marketing. There are all these facets that go into practice management and growth, and I don't know if doctors or other providers would know how to do that. What I see in the industry is that they don't.

6:11Sami Haider Your visits are 60 to 90 minutes. Most are about seven minutes. How does that work as a business?

6:20Jenna Richardson The one big thing is we're a cash-pay practice, so we're considered out of network. Our patients pay us, and then they're able to submit the invoice to insurance for reimbursement. We also work with flexible spending accounts and health savings accounts. We try to keep our costs affordable, because we want the care to be accessible. But being outside of the insurance model gives us a lot more flexibility in how we engage with our patients and how we care for them. The foundation of everything is the ability to sit across from somebody and help them feel seen, heard and understood, because there's so much of that lacking in the conventional world. I have a term that I say is our number one diagnosis, which is post-traumatic doctor disorder. People come into our clinic having been through that revolving door of healthcare, just feeling entirely unseen.

7:18Sami Haider I agree with that. When someone comes in for a first visit, how do you help them say yes without selling?

7:27Jenna Richardson We help them say yes by making patient experience number one. They feel cared for the moment they pick up the phone and call the front office, or step foot in our space. We're really about supporting people, and I use a term I call the four E's: engaging, educating, encouraging and empowering them on their journey to health and well-being. We still fight the paradigm of conventional healthcare and the conventional insurance model. But for us, COVID was as much of a blessing as it was a curse, because it really made people wake up to the fact that they need to take control of their health. They can't rely on the healthcare system or the health insurance model to actually care for their health and well-being. So it's really that empowerment piece. Providing them a roadmap: this is where we are, let's figure out what's going on, because you can't fix a problem you don't understand. Then laying out that plan of care, to truly partner with them to co-create ultimate health and well-being.

8:41Sami Haider Beautiful. What would you tell a founder whose first visits don't turn into patients?

8:47Jenna Richardson Be authentic. Be personable, be charismatic. Listen a lot more than you talk. Again, they don't teach business. They don't teach sales. They don't teach influence. A lot of times providers feel like they need to prove their value. They need to sell themselves. It's so much more about being in that receptive, caring, compassionate energy, where the patient realizes they want to do this work, because that's not what they've seen or experienced elsewhere.

9:27Sami Haider This is actually a fun one. Imagine you lose everything and start again tomorrow with only $10,000. Where do you spend it?

9:39Jenna Richardson Oh boy. If I were to start all over again, the blessing is we now have 10 years of experience, so I think it would help accelerate the process. I think the biggest investment and the greatest asset is having a strong and powerful team to support the practice. So it would go into interviewing, onboarding and hiring the right people, because with the right people in the right places, that's where scale, growth and a super solid patient experience come from.

10:16Sami Haider In our last episode, I spoke with Dr. David Borenstein, founder of Manhattan Integrative Medicine. I want to share two things he said, and you tell me if you agree. He said GLP-1 weight loss drugs are a breakthrough for some patients, but overused for quick weight loss. Do you agree?

10:39Jenna Richardson I 100% agree with that. I think there's a time and a place for GLP-1s, and really any medication. That's always been my philosophy. It's not the first line of action. We need to better empower people to understand their bodies, the value of nutrition and lifestyle, adequate protein, strength training, and all the other things that come with sustaining and maintaining any form of weight loss. What we see with GLP-1s is that the education is not there. The lifestyle-based behavioral change is not there. And I think people are being over-prescribed. If we do need to use GLP-1 medications, always start with the lowest effective dose and watch that patient, because each person is a unique biochemical machine. Not everyone responds the same way. It's all about understanding that patient and empowering them with all the other tools, to make that GLP-1 as successful as possible, but also not making them rely on it for the rest of their life.

11:57Sami Haider I 100% agree. He also said more and more new patients find him through AI, like ChatGPT. Are you seeing that too?

12:08Jenna Richardson Yes. I guess the term now is AEO, from what I've heard. SEO is down, because people aren't just jumping on Google anymore. They're going to ChatGPT and Claude and these other tools and doing the search there. I was just having this conversation in my office yesterday with my team, about how the landscape has changed from one year to the next with the mass use of AI. People used to show up at our door to say, run me these labs, interpret these labs, tell me what to do. Now they can get the labs online, put them into Claude or ChatGPT, and have at least a basic plan for how to address their health challenges. So we don't see those people as much anymore. It's really shifted the trajectory of practice in general. It's something to be aware of, how AI is impacting healthcare and integrative healthcare. But it's here to stay, so we have to figure out how we work with it.

13:27Sami Haider I agree. It's changing healthcare businesses. So let's play a game. It's called Myth or Truth. I say something people believe, you say myth or truth. First one: if you're good, patients will find you.

13:48Jenna Richardson Myth.

13:50Sami Haider Patients won't pay cash for longer visits.

13:56Jenna Richardson Myth.

13:57Sami Haider More leads always means more patients.

14:02Jenna Richardson Myth.

14:05Sami Haider I see most of them are myths. Social media is a waste of time for doctors.

14:12Jenna Richardson Myth.

14:13Sami Haider No symptoms means you're healthy.

14:17Jenna Richardson Myth.

14:18Sami Haider What is one thing you believe about running a practice that most people disagree with?

14:29Jenna Richardson Oh gosh. The one thing I believe is there's no right way to do it and no right answer, and things are constantly dynamic. There's also no goal line, if you will. You have to be adaptable and flexible, and constantly evolving.

14:47Sami Haider Quick one now. Just pick one. Memberships or pay per visit?

14:57Jenna Richardson Memberships.

14:58Sami Haider Hyperbaric oxygen: overhyped or underrated?

15:03Jenna Richardson Underrated.

15:05Sami Haider Instagram or Google?

15:07Jenna Richardson Instagram.

15:09Sami Haider This might be a little different. Your dad's advice or a business book?

15:17Jenna Richardson My dad's advice.

15:18Sami Haider Beautiful. Would you let AI reply to patient messages at night? Yes or no?

15:24Jenna Richardson Yes, we do. Not direct patient messages that are clinical in nature, but everything else.

15:31Sami Haider More for the admin or operational work?

15:35Jenna Richardson Yes.

15:37Sami Haider Coffee or green juice?

15:40Jenna Richardson I'm a coffee girl. It's the one thing I can't give up.

15:43Sami Haider If you could send one text to yourself on opening day, January 2017, what would it say?

15:53Jenna Richardson It's my motto to this day: everything is always working out for you.

15:58Sami Haider We're starting a new tradition today. Every guest leaves one question for the next founder on the show. They won't know who asked it. What question would you like to ask?

16:10Jenna Richardson I would like to ask how you plan to adapt to market changes over the next one to five years.

16:21Sami Haider This is the last one. What has building this with your dad meant to you?

16:29Jenna Richardson Oh gosh, I don't want to get emotional about that. There are pros and cons of working with your family, for sure. I think it's given us both a sense of purpose in our lives that we never thought possible. My dad is turning 72 on his next birthday and he's still working, whereas he always believed he would retire at 65, which is the standard age here. He was counting down the days to retirement at age 62 when we founded Princeton Integrative Health. So he jokes that he would be retired by now if it weren't for me. But watching him find his passion through this work, and the reward of helping the hundreds, if not thousands, of people we have, seeing people come in debilitated and literally regain their lives, is unlike anything I could have ever imagined or found in my corporate career. And I believe he feels the same.

17:47Sami Haider That's beautiful. Where can people find you?

17:52Jenna Richardson We're online at www.princetonih.com.

17:59Sami Haider Jenna, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. To everyone watching, if this helped you, share it with a founder who needs it. I'm Sami Haider. This has been Founders in Practice. See you in the next one.