Whole Person Clinical Strategies for Root Cause Cognitive Health

Welcome to another episode of Innovations in Clinical Implementation, the Ovation Lab and A4M series dedicated to turning cutting-edge tools and evidence into Monday morning pearls for clinical practice. We're recording live at Longevity Fest 2025, where health and metabolic resistance continue to be top priorities for functional and longevity medicine clinicians. So today we are joined by two friends and colleagues, Dr. Jeff Glad and Ben Walters. For those of you that don't know Jeff Glad, he is the chief medical officer at Fullscript and a practicing integrative medicine physician in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Ben Walters is head of journeys at Fullscript, and we're really excited to talk about some of the vision and focus and priorities for Fullscript as well as specifically Journeys. So welcome, Jeff and Ben.

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great to be here. I know, Jeff, from conversations we've had over the last year that whole-person care is a real priority and sort of a centerpiece for Fullscript going forward. But as you're really moving into it, what would you say are the big challenges that you're encountering?

Yeah, so for us, the positioning of whole-person care was really how do we create the largest umbrella to reach the most practitioners and therefore reach the most patients? Right. So for years, it was the platform for integrative medicine. And as we've seen more interest from traditional allopathic physicians, nurse practitioners, we say we have an integrative platform. They're not integrative practitioners. So we miss the connection there. So using the broader umbrella of whole-person care, which is all that we're all doing, right? It's root cause and putting those pieces together is why whole-person care for us. I think some of the difficulties there, if you take that allopathic traditional segment, they are not educated in this world. And so it's a complete— I remember Dr. Weil saying this when I did the Arizona fellowship day one, like, this is a paradigm shift. In how you care for patients. And so we can't expect that paradigm just to turn on immediately. So we're building the tools to help that practitioner start to think differently, look at the lab data differently, interpret this in a way where you're trying to predict what's going on, you know, outside of what's inside the normal Quest reference range, right? So education becomes key, but they don't have a ton of time either. So how can we build tools to make that really simple? For them to kind of get on board and also deliver this to their patients. But for the integrative and functional trained practitioners, it's information overload and it's workflow burden, and they don't have time to see more patients, right? I mean, my clinic is 6 months, you know, with a 6-month waiting list. So are most of the busy clinicians. So how can we give them tools to speed up their workflow, take down their administrative burden, and ultimately allow themselves to scale, right? They want to grow their practices, but they have very limited time to do that. So How can we use technology? How can we use AI to turn their voice into something elegant so that their interpretation isn't 30 minutes long, it's 4 minutes long, right? And so those pieces all fit together for both of those segments. And that's why we're incredibly excited to just build, you know, toward this whole-person care platform that we have as opposed to simply just a supplement dispensing platform.

What I love actually about what you said is that you are, that whole-person care is now solving for both of these markets, both the unfamiliar conventional practitioner that you've created a term, an umbrella that's immediately relatable, right? And for the more seasoned functional integrative medicine clinician, you're solving for these everyday in-the-practice challenges around workflow, burden, productivity, efficiency. Yes.

100%. Love it.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, you mentioned a paradigm shift. And so I think a big paradigm shift is this integration of AI and technology into clinical workflows. So can you dive into exactly what Fullscript is doing to help practitioners kind of facilitate this paradigm shift for them, especially for two camps of practitioners that are maybe not so technologically advanced and those that are more willing to dive into AI?

Yeah, for sure. So we've now been able to take and use AI which we call Fullscript Assist. So this is a big AI/ML team partnered with our in-house clinicians. So it's not just AI, it's got the medical validation behind all that. So practitioners have a ton of context on every patient they see, right? They have their history, they have their symptoms, they have their lab data, they have their supplement and medication list, right? How much time in that visit does it take to review all of that? And for a lot of these practices, patients are paying cash, right? So they're paying for each minute. Right. How can we streamline and get them to talk more about the treatment planning and do some education? So FS Assist allows the practitioner to simply use that and in seconds create the optimal evidence-based ingredient treatment plan for them. Again, is it medication-induced nutrient depletion recommendations? We certainly then have the nutrient and medication interaction piece, right? So not only are they evidence-based recommendations, their safe recommendations, and then using that lab data to further educate that practitioner and patient on where else are we finding gaps and where else should we focus. So that's really FS Assist in Fullscript Standard. And then Ben can touch on where we're using AI in that interpretation experience for Journeys as we get into that in a little bit.

Yeah, and I'll just jump in there for a second. What we've realized is when you speak to clinicians, they're all using AI. But what it looks like right now is it's copy paste into ChatGPT, pull back out, copy paste back into EMR. And we know that that's just not sustainable, especially in the healthcare space where HIPAA and data are very— like, we need to be very careful. And so what we've really taken a stance on is like, we need to embed AI into workflows. It cannot be an off-to-the-side copy and paste type workflow. How do we create the operating system where clinicians can practice? And then how do we embed AI into that workflow to just give them superpowers in their everyday? Versus creating another separate workflow.

Yeah. And what I love about that, it is kind of in this gray transition period as we start to integrate AI, is exactly what you just said, is it alleviates some of the manual effort but doesn't completely eliminate it. For sure. And so I would love for you to dive into exactly how Fullscript, and specifically Journeys, is alleviating some of that manual processing that's still required as you start to implement AI.

Yeah, so as Dr. Glad pointed out, there's so much information we know about patients. Mm-hmm. First, how do you get all that information in one place, right? Right now, that information is often fragmented across a bunch of different systems. We believe that if you can aggregate that data, then you can layer on top of it AI that actually has all the context. And so we say a lot about personalization. You can only personalize if you have all that patient context. So one of the first things that we do with Journeys and what we've done is we've said, okay, well, we need to have intake information. There's a lot of valuable tidbits in intake information that allow you to inform care plan downstream.

Mm-hmm.

So one piece is, okay, you need intake information, you need lab result data, you need past lab result data. So you need to be able to upload past lab results. You need to be able to integrate your wearable device, and you need to be able to answer questions and patient-reported outcomes along the way. If we can collect all of that patient context in one place, it's actually not that hard then to take AI models, sit on top of that data, and build truly personalized care plans for that patient. And then the really fun work is like, how do you make sure that care plan evolves and you breathe life into it so it is constantly checking checking in on patients and saying, hey, is this plan working for you? Well, we know if it's working for you because if your goal was to sleep better, we actually know if you're sleeping or if you're not sleeping. And we are— we know by checking in if you're taking your magnesium in the evening or when you're taking it. And so what we want to really do is just give patients the place to put all of their patient context. We then want to build a plan on top of it that is informed by all that patient context and do it in one system so that everything stays in four nice clean walls.

I think the intake piece is really key because you've got, especially in this integrative and functional space, 8 to 15 pages of an intake form that's either handwritten and scanned in or it's a fillable PDF. Like the practitioner reading that is only gleaning like 5 or 10%.

Right.

Can we take all of the really important intake information that when patients see it woven into their interpretation, appreciate the value and want to continue to engage because they see all of that information being used. And again, with zero effort on the practitioner.

And we talk about this a lot with the integration of AI is now your health record becomes an equitable source of information versus this kind of non-interactable document that just sits in a folder until you need it. And so one of the things that I think about often is, okay, we're alleviating a lot of time on practitioners' schedules, which now opens us up to scaling. And so can you talk about how we might integrate something like journeys for a practitioner, especially solo practitioner, to then scale themselves without diluting the quality of their care?

Yeah. So, yeah, time is obviously the asset, right? And so we know that if we can reduce the amount of touch time while delivering the clinical sort of care, the level of clinical the level of clinical quality that we know that our clinicians want, then we can allow them to take on more and more visits. So what we've done is we've tracked very closely how good we are at building an interpretation and a wellness plan automatically on behalf of the provider. So upfront, you do a little bit of an onboarding. You need to understand all the patient— sorry, all the practitioner context. We call it codifying the algorithm. They all have an algorithm of how they're delivering care. How do you take that and put it onto paper so that we can then build a model that can replicate the clinical style and tone of each clinician? And so there is a little bit bit of an onboarding upfront. Once you do that onboarding, what we've now taken, we've taken a lab interpretation and a wellness plan creation from about 45 minutes to an hour to now 7 minutes, just under 7 minutes. And we were tracking that number very carefully. And so when you can turn what is 45 minutes into 7 minutes, you've literally been able to 5x the amount of patients that a clinician can take on and do so with a better delivery of care because then the patient has all the context in one place. And again, it living and breathing. You can create asynchronous check-ins so that a patient doesn't need to actually book and schedule another appointment in order to get an update on what that care plan should look like. And so we're very excited about how we can just dramatically raise the ceiling on what a patient base could look like for a practitioner.

And it's critical to deliver whole-person care to more patients, right? Our CEO puts out a North Star email every Monday to the company And the metric we're following now is patients under care. Hmm. Right. And we know that there are a growing number of patients who demand this care, and they're doing it all by themselves. Yeah. Using this, you know, direct-to-consumer lab testing without a practitioner guiding this. Right. And most of them are lost. Mm-hmm. We know the practitioners are out there, but we also know they're incredibly busy. So how can we scale them so that there's just more patients under care in this whole-person world? Right. If I look at my clinic, again, 6-month waiting list. Most of my day are follow-up patients that are check-ins and, hey, everything's great, pat you on the back, what's going on? Meanwhile, the patient who critically needs me is waiting 6 months. How can I offload those into async experiences where it's still my care, they still feel very cared for and monitored? Obviously, if something shows up, we bring them back into the office. But now how can I open up my care to the people who really need it? That's the way we're scaling these practitioners.

Yeah, I mean, it's on multiple levels, right? It's not only these initial visits in which you're reducing the amount of time from 45 minutes to 7 for lab integration and interpretation, but as you just said then, for the follow-up visits as well to be able to do them asynchronously. Definitely.

Yeah. And we've even seen like some of our providers that are using Journeys now, they used to start with, hey, I'm going to do an appointment upfront. You're going to get your extensive intake form and then I'm going to give you a lab requisition. You're going to go do your lab requisition and then you're going to come back. Yeah, for many patients, let's just give them the right lab requisition up front. Avoid that first need for an extensive intake appointment and a visit. Give them a lab requisition, and then the first appointment they come in and we have all this information about the patient. We can deliver an actual care plan and they can walk out of that first visit with the care plan that can help them optimize their health. Yeah.

And so, yeah, yeah. The other part of that is the big lag time from someone wanting to come in to go, okay, now I'm going to do the initial appointment, we're going to do the intake, and then you're going to help me understand what labs you think I should should be ordered, and I have to do the labs, and then they have to get interpreted and come back.

Yeah.

Yeah. One other quick thing, and then we go back to you is at this point, what is the actual implementation of journeys for full-scope practitioners?

Like, where are you? So, yeah, good question. So we— I'm like a product guy at heart. We believe that you need to work with 10 practitioners very closely. So I'm meeting with practitioners twice a week, spending 25 hours with the sort of 10 that we're working with. And we are just handholding every single step of the process. 4 weeks ago, we hit the point where all of them are like, okay, this is ready for primetime. And so what we've now done is we just opened up a waitlist very recently. We're going to launch 1,000 practitioners by the end of Q1 to be able to use the sort of end-to-end journey experience. And because we've done so much handholding with these 10 providers upfront, we know that we're ready to like actually scale.

Yeah.

Wow. And on the back end, you know, we're getting to the point where AI interpretation because that clinical and AI/ML team are working so closely together. It used to take a lot of clinician editing before we would send it to the Journeys clinician. So we've got the Fullscript practitioners looking at everything, refining everything. Every change then moves forward and is already changed with the next interpretation. So now there's a very, very light touch on the Fullscript clinician and almost no touch on the Journeys clinician. So that machine just keeps rolling. As we have more practitioners, more data, more interpretations, it just keeps getting more, more streamlined, smarter, efficient.

Yes. And you mentioned this briefly and when you were talking about journeys, but about outcomes.

Yeah.

And so as we start to track, you know, patients and their behavior and what labs they're engaging with, what supplements they're ordering, talk to me a little bit about the potential for the data that we're also gathering by tracking that journey of both the patient and the practitioner.

Yeah. One of the first people that Dr. Glad introduced me to was Dr. Hanaway. And we spoke— we spent a lot of time talking about outcomes. Our product director Max is now meeting with Henway on a very frequent basis and just making sure that we embed patient-reported outcomes into the journey experience so that we can then report on those outcomes. And so right now we're keeping it pretty basic in that we're using a PROMS-10 framework and we're just using that at, hey, let's baseline overall health and understand where you are. And then there's a check-in at 1 month or 2 months. We actually let the providers choose when that sort of next check-in is, and then we can just track actual patient-reported outcomes via a vehicle. And like, again, when you take that data and then you can say, okay, what is the care plan or the protocol that the patient is following and what is working and not working? It allows you to really understand how we can ensure that we can scale the most evidence-based protocols to the most amount of patients.

Well, and I think it's important to remind practitioners, like, for you to actually track that questionnaire with your care plan, manually document that in your chart, manual align that with symptoms, actually translate that manually and cognitively. The amount of time that you just save by doing that is actually incredible. I mean, you're getting literally like years back on your life as a clinician.

And how like so few clinicians are even looking at their outcomes, right? Right. Like they, they sort of subjectively and qualitatively can tell you my care works. We're actually going to be able to objectively give them the data to market to their communities and however many states they want to be licensed in, their care works. And then pulling all this together, we want whole-person care to just be healthcare. You can't do that without really compelling outcome studies. And so we built that at the foundation to make sure Journeys powers that.

That's incredible. That's super exciting. I know we're going to have to wrap up. I have one quick thing I'd love to— so with this goal of 1,000 practitioners using Journeys by the end of the first quarter. Yeah. How are you opening up to people? We're going to have lots of people on this podcast, I imagine, that are going to be like, I'd like to participate.

So one of the cell phone numbers—

well, honestly, reach out. Ben Walters at Fullscript.com. I love speaking to providers. We've got a waitlist. You can in a couple of clicks just add yourself to that waitlist. I should know the URL offhand and I don't. So we can add it to like the show notes or something because I got, I got, I got that website. That's the easiest way right now. And then we're going to do what we call like a white glove sort of onboarding process for those first few hundred to just to make sure that everyone gets the, the care that they need. And then again, once it comes to Q2, it's going to be you'll be able to onboard yourself in hopefully 20 minutes, less, launch your Journeys experience. And yeah, we'll see where we go from there.

Yeah, well, hugely exciting. Big congratulations. Thanks for talking with us about this. Do you have any wrap-up comment or question.

Yes, so we'll include the URL, but if you want to dive in deeper into what Fullscript has to offer, especially around journeys, please check out the resources on our Innovations and Clinical Implementation landing page. This episode will launch in early 2026, so I'm sure there will be lots of developments even in the next several weeks. So we look forward to seeing you on that landing page, and thank you both for joining us.

Thanks so much. Yeah, thanks for having us.

Great.

Yeah.