Transcript

Ronnie Wilson:
Talk a little bit, if you would, about the emphasis that you guys have on wellness. Define that if you would and articulate a bit of why that is such a critical value here.

Jay Johnson:
I think you know that being a nurse practitioner I went to school and I, obviously, at some point in my career, thought I was going to go to be a medical doctor. I think somewhere along the line, I got really turned off to medicine in general, not necessarily to doctors, and not individual doctors, just medicine in general because the concept early on in medicine was to treat illness, that was the intent. You got sick, you treated the illness, you moved on. Well I think the transition, and I think it’s in medicine too, but I think the transition is it’s much better to try to care for people and prevent illness than to treat illness. So we spend a lot of here time trying to concentrate on teaching. Teaching kids how to be healthy. Teaching parents how to take care of their kids to be healthy. I have conversations every day about teaching healthy eating habits. While teaching all these kind of things, they say “Well they’re kids, let them him have a little flexibility in their life.” And I understand that. I’m a parent. I have kids myself. But the concept, if you teach them young, they’re gonna prosper later in life because they’re going to gain a lifetime of knowledge from the education you gave them. Don’t wait till it’s a problem! We have to teach them, teach them this all throughout.

So, I think, in the aspect of caring for wellness, it’s just a much better concept of medicine. It’s going to be much cheaper in the long run. I mean it may not be initially, but I think from just the medical care in itself it’s going to be much cheaper in the long run to care for wellness  because it’s a lot cheaper in general. It’s much cheaper to keep people well than to have sickness, than to have people in the hospital, than to have all this kind of stuff. So the hope is if we can teach wellness, there always will be sickness so you’re not getting away from sickness. You’re just trying to teach people how not to be as sick as often, to spend much less time here or in urgent care or ERs. Ultimately I think wellness really is going to be the defining feature of our next generation. We’re trying to keep people well, to save money, you don’t have to worry about illness. That’s where it becomes a big deal in wellness, because we don’t want to just see you when you’re sick, we want to see you well. That develops our relationship. I want to see you every year to see how you’re doing. How you growing. What you’re doing in your life, even if it’s just for wellness and stuff like that. That’s, where I think we’re hopefully heading. I know we, as a practice, try to spend a lot of time preaching wellness or trying to teach wellness. We are educators in that perspective.