Welcome And Guest Introduction

Dr Andrew Greenland 0:00

Welcome back to Voices in Health and Wellness. This is the podcast where we explore the real stories behind the practitioners, founders, and innovators who are reshaping what modern healthcare looks like. Today I'm joined by Dr. Megha Mohey, a board certified physician in internal and integrative medicine with advanced training in functional medicine and medical acupuncture. She's founder of Way Integrative and Functional Health, where she focuses on helping patients address root causes, particularly around metabolic health, longevity, and whole person care. So with that, Megha, I'd love to welcome you to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. Very much looking forward to the conversation.

Dr Megha Mohey 0:35

Hi, Andrew. Thank you so much. First of all, I really appreciate you having me on your show. I'm excited about this conversation.

Dr Andrew Greenland 0:45

Great. Well, let's get stuck in. Perhaps we could start with a little bit about your journey into medicine and more specifically what led you into integrative and functional medicine.

Dr Megha Mohey 0:54

Yeah, absolutely. So I've been practicing internal medicine close to two decades now. And over that time, I've loved having relationships with my patients and treating chronic disease. But I started to find that the time I was able to spend with them kept decreasing. My administrative responsibilities kept increasing. I was like focused on documentation, managing my inbox, getting prior authorizations. And it just felt like I was not practicing the type of medicine I went to medical school for. So over time I started to look at okay, how can I provide more meaningful care? Instead of just putting out fires, how can we like take a step back and look at what's actually causing disease and where can we start working to make meaningful change in the long term? So that's what led me to do a fellowship in integrative medicine through Andrew Weill Institute of Integrative Medicine at University of Arizona. And then I just loved it, like myself personally learning about taking care of our own self, right? In medicine, we are taught just work and work, and it's okay if you get burnt out. So that was fascinating for myself personally, and I wanted to share that with my patients. And then that led me to continue training in functional medicine and acupuncture and yoga.

Two Practices And A Bigger Vision

Dr Andrew Greenland 2:20

Lovely. Always helpful to have some background and context. Thank you for that. So can you walk us through what your current practice looks like at the moment and how Way Integrative and Functional Health fits into your broader vision of what you're wanting in healthcare?

Dr Megha Mohey 2:33

Yeah, absolutely. So currently I actually have two practices. I still have my traditional internal medicine, solo private practice. And then I launched Way Health last year, which is a more personalized concierge-style integrative and functional medicine. So in this practice at Way Health, I do consultations. It's non-insurance based. We spend as much time as we can. My initial visits may be an hour, sometimes 75 minutes, and we do like a deep dive, like we see where actual patients started to develop some of these symptoms and what could have maybe in their past led to these. And then we just do step by step personalized if we need to do any testing. And I focus a lot on foundations of health. So we'll focus on sleep and nutrition, stress management, lifestyle, relationships, and then we build upon from there.

Dr Andrew Greenland 3:36

Wonderful. Well, great stuff that I love in this kind of medicine. But I guess if you've got two different practices and you're doing two different things, how do you navigate between the two? The kind of the traditional what you were doing before, with all the limitations that has, and this new wonderful way of looking at people. How do you kind of switch between those two and rationalize it in your head?

A Real Day Inside Way Health

Dr Megha Mohey 3:56

Yeah, it's always a challenge. So I'm always like struggling to create time for myself and set boundaries. So one of the ways I'm doing it is I have different days, right? So I'm in my traditional medicine practice currently three and a half days a week, and the other day and a half I have for Way Health. So it's uh it is, it's trying to balance. And even actually in my traditional practice, I feel like I am running behind because I want to work with my patients on not just medication adjustment, on talking about a lot of these things. But then at the end of the workday, you just feel like exhausted, right? Because you're giving so much and so much little time. So it's a nice change and a breather for me when I'm at Way Health and I'm having these longer, more personalized um conversations with patients.

Dr Andrew Greenland 4:53

So you're describing two very different days. You've obviously partitioned the two different clinic settings on the different days. What does it look like in a typical day in your Way Health practice from start to finish? How do you fill your day?

Dr Megha Mohey 5:06

So, what it looks like is um I may do one, usually one to two new consults, not more than that. And those can take anywhere from 60 to 75 minutes. I'm based in Michigan, so I'll do in-person consultations, but I may also do virtual for whoever prefers that. And then the rest of the day is filled up with follow-ups. And most of my follow-up visits are usually 30 minutes, but right before our call, I did a follow-up and it was almost an hour. So I'll do follow-ups and then I um, based on those visits, I uh communicate with my patients via email, giving them an a treatment plan for everything we talked about. Um, and then rest of the day and part of the day is also on business development and growth and admin stuff.

Dr Andrew Greenland 5:59

Got it. Okay. Um are you seeing any major shifts in functional and integrated medicine at the moment?

Dr Megha Mohey 6:08

Um are you referring to something specific or just in general?

Dr Andrew Greenland 6:13

In terms of you, you're in the space. I just wondered if um, having been doing this kind of medicine for a while, you're seeing a shift in terms of patient expectations, what people are coming to the table with, what patients are looking for, or anything wider in the space?

Dr Megha Mohey 6:25

Yeah, that's a that's a great question. What I'm seeing a lot is I think a lot of patients are already doing so many things. So with what's available on online and social media, so a lot of these patients are doing too many things at one time. So I see them, and they either have been doing all these supplements and all this testing and trying things on their own, and they're still not feeling well, and they need some guidance, and they need really what they need is to take a step back and for us to simplify things and just like personalize to what they particularly individually need. And the other thing I'm seeing is that there's more patients who have had a lot of conventional labs done and they're told like everything looks normal and they are not feeling well. So they have had this fatigue, or they've had this brain fog or chronic GI symptoms, or they've been trying to lose weight on their own, and they're just not able to do that. So um, and so we work on that. So we do a deep dive and we are seeing what really may be causing it.

Dr Andrew Greenland 7:37

So you talk about patients doing a lot of stuff on their own beforehand and coming to you and they're kind of getting stuck. But do they have any um have the expectations of what they expect from you as a practitioner changed in the time you've been doing this?

Dr Megha Mohey 7:50

Um what I have noticed most is for them to really understand what's going with their going on with their body. Because, like I said, I think they're already some of so there's a dichotomy. So there's some people who need more support and have been told conventionally things are looking good. And then there's on the other hand, there's more a lot of what patients I'm seeing are these high-functioning uh individuals who read and who try things, and they're like, you know what, I'm doing all of this and it's not working. What else do I need to do? And so their expectations are why aren't things working? Because I've tried all of these things. And what I find for them, we have to go back and we have to go back to the foundations, and we are more intentional in what they are doing, and maybe they don't need to take 20 supplements, and maybe they don't need to take a whole peptide stack, and we just choose what really they actually might need.

Dr Andrew Greenland 8:52

Thank you. And um, do you have particular interests and niche interests within these spaces, or are you very much a generalist? And if so, what's the things that um you are seeing in high demand for your service? What are people looking for in terms of or conditions they're coming to the table with?

Dr Megha Mohey 9:07

Yeah, so I'm I would call myself a generalist, but having said that, I find that I'm treating a lot of IBS and chronic dysbios, just dysbiosis. And as we know, most things start in the gut, so it makes sense. Somebody may come with something and we look at their gut and they have something going on. So I find myself a majority of what I end up treating is chronic GI symptoms, and that ends up leading to malabsorption or nutrient deficiencies, and then it may tie in in a lot of cases with uh men and women with hormone transitions or some metabolic disease. Um, so that's that's kind of where it leads.

Clinic Growth Challenges And Scaling Plans

Dr Andrew Greenland 9:51

So think about this from a business standpoint, because you are running businesses at the end of the day. What is uh working particularly well for you? What are you most proud of in your clinic business?

Dr Megha Mohey 10:00

Yeah, I think what's really working well, it took me a while to launch WayHealth, and I'm really happy I did it. It's like the type of practice I wanted to create and really spend that time. So be a to be able to offer that, and uh patients really appreciate it, and they're seeing the results that they have been trying to find for a long time. So I am really proud of myself to actually create this physician-led personalized model of delivery.

Dr Andrew Greenland 10:32

And I think you said you've been filtered this fairly recently in the grand scheme of things. So, what are some of the difficulties and challenges of doing this and setting up from scratch that you've had to navigate?

Dr Megha Mohey 10:43

Yeah, so in medical school, we are not taught how to run a business. So that's been one of the major challenges. And even in my traditional medicine, like just working with insurances and so much is changing there, that's always hard, like with staffing issues and administrative burden. In my new practice at Way Health, one of the challenges has been just being able to scale this a little bit more. And by scaling it, I don't mean me seeing so many patients in a day. But uh, in this area and just online, there's so many resources, right? So just finding and getting those patients. So I've been fortunate just working in Michigan for a long time. There's, you know, I've been able to develop trust, trust, and relationships. So I do have, I rely a lot on word of mouth referrals, uh, but just getting more of those patients because people can go uh and look, and there's so many people who call themselves functional medicine physicians and holistic physicians in this space. So that's that's been a little bit of a challenge as well.

Dr Andrew Greenland 11:55

Thank you. That's really good insight. And what about um is there anything that's particularly frustrating? What are the biggest frustrations in the work that you do at the moment, in either practice for that matter?

Dr Megha Mohey 12:04

Yeah. I think the frustration is um, and it's not just even frustration, but I think it is just getting that consistency and simplicity. So a lot of times patients who are coming to see me at WayHealth have they've already tried other things. So they're seeking this kind of care and they want to put the work in. But day to day I find people's lives are so busy, right? And even like at least here in the US, to get to make the right healthy choices and to get like good quality food and to not be exposed to so many toxins and to have these things available, it just takes a lot of effort on people's part. So even to make some changes that are foundational in people's busy lives, it requires a lot of consistency. And um, so that's I think it's some something I see. And I think we can also apply those to our own lives too, right?

Dr Andrew Greenland 13:08

Well, of course, of course. We have to practice what you preach and be a good ambassadors for the stuff that we do for people. You just um hit on the word scaling now, and I'm always interested, you know, you're doing this as a single-handed operation. What are the ways in which one can grow this from your perspective of where you are now, where you like to be with your clinic? What sort of things are you thinking about doing to grow and scale this?

Dr Megha Mohey 13:33

Yeah, so I am thinking the ways I my vision for it in the near future may be making this like a team-based approach, so where I could have um, say, acupuncturist or therapist or uh a nurse practitioner or nurses working with me and dietitians, and then also using technology and creating online resources and other platforms to make it easier. Um, that's where I that's where I see I could get help and build.

Dr Andrew Greenland 14:07

Fantastic. And for you personally, because obviously you're wearing probably a lot of the hats at the moment, you're obviously delivering clinical care, you're also running the business side of things. What are the biggest time drains for you personally as a practitioner in this work?

Dr Megha Mohey 14:20

Yeah. It's you know, documentation, communication. And one of the things that I'm also doing is a little bit of social media for just education and visibility. And that's not something that's just naturally uh natural to me. So that also takes extra time. Um, and that's that sucks my energy a little bit.

Dr Andrew Greenland 14:47

Fair game, fair game. Um so you talked about um possibly growing a team at some point. How what would be your approach to building a team? Because obviously, this is really important work, and the dynamics of the people that you work with are very important, but also the way they relate to patients. How will you be looking for those magic people that you can work with?

Dr Megha Mohey 15:09

Yeah. So, I mean, as it is already, I have uh patients that I refer to different providers in the area, and I've to some of them we've all already talked about how we could work together. Um, so the way I think I would work is just by current experience, and it's good feedback when I hear from patients how their experiences when I send them to these people, and vice versa. And I'm always looking to expand my referral network and develop these relationships. And I think a lot of other providers are trying to do the same, and they all value having a team and working together.

Dr Andrew Greenland 15:49

Nice. So at the moment, uh you're a solo practitioner, as I understand at the moment, is that right?

Dr Megha Mohey 15:54

Yeah, I'm a solo, I do have a part-time nurse, uh-huh. Uh, but outside of that, yeah, I am a solo practitioner.

Dr Andrew Greenland 16:00

So we're just talking about sort of growing and scaling, what you might do in the future. But if you suddenly had an influx of new patients next week, say, I don't know, 10 new patients that wanted to see you next week, what would happen?

Dr Megha Mohey 16:12

Um, I would make time for it, but I would have to just um schedule differently. And then I do have I'm always looking and developing relationships. So I do have certain nurse practitioners and physician assistants I've been in conversations with. So if it was just next week, I can totally manage it. If it was the next few weeks, I would love it. And then if it was past that, I would definitely need to get some help sooner and be able to properly allocate time and resources.

Dr Andrew Greenland 16:48

I'm thinking about you know trying to reach more patients generally. I know you have a big interest in metabolic health, if I remember correctly, from our chat before. Is there any space for group programs, do you think, in this world? And how would you approach it?

Dr Megha Mohey 17:01

Yeah, I have given it some thought. I haven't launched any group programs yet, but I am thinking even like doing either monthly or bi-monthly group sessions online. And I've I have patients who've expressed that interest. So um at some point I think I probably will try it and see how it goes. But I I hear plus and minus on both ends, and I guess I just have to try it myself and see how that experience is for patients and myself.

Dr Andrew Greenland 17:32

I guess it's that tension that we have. We're trying to do individualized medicine for the individual, and yet we want to extend our reach, and there's kind of a happy medium somewhere between doing the both. And can we find people with a similar profile that we can actually, you know, scale our time by speaking to them as a group and with all the advantages that a group has with support networks and then providing their own support to each other? Um, I guess we have to, there's a there's a happy medium there, I guess.

Dr Megha Mohey 17:59

Yeah, I think there is, and I guess for that looks different for everybody. Um so that is something I do plan to do, but I haven't gone that far yet.

Dr Andrew Greenland 18:10

And will you do you think you'll still keep both practices going? So your traditional practice as well as functional medicine is you always your goal to really transition completely into the functional medicine space?

Dr Megha Mohey 18:21

Um, I don't know yet. I mean, the traditional medicine practice I have, I've been there for so long, and I really value the relationships I've developed with patients. So it's to the idea of letting it go seems really hard, but I do think in either or probably both practices, I will need help. So my goal is as this grows to start getting help in my traditional practice and have more assistance in this and kind of then go from there and then see how our changing landscape and working with insurances uh uh is in the future.

Dr Andrew Greenland 18:58

Thank you. And um building a business, obviously there are systems in place. Are there any systems you're particularly proud of that work really, really well, or on the other side of the coin have completely bombed and you have to kind of do a rethink?

Dr Megha Mohey 19:12

Um I think systems that have worked well for me, um, even in my old practice, I have good staff that really help me, and keeping that uh assistance with follow-ups and messaging and uh just keeping the patients in the loop and communication that really helps. And that's part of what I found a reason to start Way Health because lives get busy, and a lot of times patients may lose touch with us for months, for two months or three months, and then you start with them again and you feel like you're starting over again. So the systems that I've created and the way I work at Way Health is I my biggest program is like a four-month intensive, which I found that to make meaningful change for any of these things can take at least three to four months. So, by with this four-month intensive, patients have unlimited access to me and we work really closely, and they will message me all the time, and we keep making the next appointment every time I see them, and that may be in a couple of weeks or three weeks, depending on what we are doing. And I found that having that intensive uh support and this program has actually really helped, and it's given us the ability to keep uh making changes and seeing the results of that, or change course if we need to. So I think that's what's I found that system has worked for me and that program's worked for me. Um, in terms of what hasn't worked, it's hard to say of anything big that stands out. I mean, there's always small things you go along and you make changes. Um yeah.

Lessons Learned And What Comes Next

Dr Andrew Greenland 21:10

Um so if you were starting out again tomorrow with everything you know in either your traditional practice or your functional medicine practice, would you do anything differently?

Dr Megha Mohey 21:19

Um I would probably start Way Health earlier and just, you know, launch it maybe another five years earlier than I did. But outside of that, I don't think I would do anything different. I love the fact that I want to learn more things. And I think it comes from me personally wanting to learn more and apply these things and then share with other people. So I just wish that I had started that journey sooner. But outside of that, no.

Dr Andrew Greenland 21:48

I mean, hindsight's a wonderful thing, but I take your point. Um, so and if you had a magic wand and you could fix anything in the practice tomorrow, is there anything that you would love to be able to fix overnight?

Dr Megha Mohey 22:04

I would say just have a uh continuous uh rhythm and pace to my practice. So right now there are certain weeks that are really busy and certain they're like up and down. So having that just uh constant, well-balanced pace. But having worked in medicine for a while, I know there is never like a perfect pace. We are like riding waves. So um that's what I would fix.

Dr Andrew Greenland 22:37

And what does the future hold? What do you um hope where do you hope to be in sort of six to 12 months time with it with either practice?

Dr Megha Mohey 22:44

I hope to be where I can scale this to a more outside of Michigan. So as in, I my hope is to get more licenses and have a more virtual presence as well, because I get inquiries all the time from people from out of state if they see anything from my social media or my Substack. So that's my hope to be able to just scale it to the sense where I'm able to, from a licensing perspective and my systems in place, be able to work with people even outside of Michigan.

Dr Andrew Greenland 23:16

Wonderful. Well, I do wish you all the best with that and your practice. And it's been great having you on. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your background, your journey, and the way that you're building your practice and some of the things around that, you know, the challenges, but also the stuff going well. Um, I hope this has been useful to our listeners. That's what I'm trying to create here. Just sharing some of not just the clinical lessons, but also the behind the scenes stuff that it's so important for us to all embrace as business people and clinic owners. So thank you very much for joining us, Megha. It's been lovely. Thank you.

Dr Megha Mohey 23:47

Thank you so much, and thank you for having this platform for us for us to learn from each other.