Rupa Health: A revolutionary platform transforming the landscape of health with Dr. Kate Kreskey

Hello, friends, and welcome to Perfect Practice. Today we have a awesome conversation in store for you. Somebody who I've gotten to know over the last few months and is super enthusiastic about the same thing I am, which is decentralizing, democratizing health. And I think our, our core philosophy is how do we make it affordable, how do we make it accessible, how do we make it fun, and how do we make it empowering? So with me today I have Kate Kresge, Dr. Kate Kresge, who is the director of Medical education for Rupa Health. And she is here to share with us all the amazing things that are happening and available to us as healthcare practitioners. We're going to talk about her journey and how she came to be and play the role that she is playing right now, and what excites her about the future of healthcare. If you're listening to this podcast, it's because you want to know what the future has in store and how to co create it. And that means staying on top of what's on the cutting edge of what's available to us and what's coming down the pipeline. So we're so excited to bring this conversation to you. And without further ado, welcome. Kate. Thanks for joining me today.

I'm pumped to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. So I know Rupa some people might be familiar with Rupa, but for those people that aren't, maybe you can give us the high level before we dive into what Rupa does and what it has to offer all of us.

Absolutely. So Rupa Health is a tech company that is dedicated to helping bring root cause medicine to the world. And that's our quick one liner. When we drill into that. What that means is we're dedicated to helping root cause practitioners bring root cause medicine to the world. And there's a couple things we need to do to do that. Rupa started with our founders asking functional medicine practitioners, what do you wish existed to make your job easier? What could we build that would let you reach thousands more than you're reaching right now? What could we build that would save you time and allow you to scale? And what practitioners told us was reduce administrative overhead, make practicing medicine cheaper, help their clients afford functional medicine lab testing. And so we started there and the product we originally built was so that you could order any functional medicine lab test on the market with a single click, very similar to Amazon. So no logging into multiple portals for like a sibo breath test and a gut test and a blood lab test. Like no all in one place. Click under 30 seconds. You can order your client any combination of labs available on the market, get sent straight to them. Done. So we built that, and then we built the ability for clients to pay over time for free. So we give them payment plans. Yeah. And then what happened after that is that practitioners started asking us for more things. So they started asking us for tools to help them understand labs and know what to do when their clients came back with certain results. Right. So, okay, well, I knew enough to test my client for Hashimoto's, and I know kind of like the standard treatment for it, but I'm new to functional medicine. What are some protocols that I could use to help my client truly heal? And so rather than combing the Internet for hours, we have built a natural database of that information written by doctors. And then the other thing that we built recently is the food planning tool, which is really cool. You like, type in a few words and we'll build your client a week long meal plan. So pretty much anything people ask us for, we build. And which is why I like to say we're just a platform that helps practitioners save time. I think one of my pleas to the universe as a functional medicine provider who was practicing by myself and trying to help clients who were really suffering and didn't have a lot of money, was that I wish tech would come in and help. And so RUPA just felt like an answer to my prayers. And so I'm just so thrilled to be working with them now.

That's awesome. So what's the thing that excites you the most about all the things that you talked about? Is it the education? Is it the meal planning? I know you got really excited when we talked about nutrition, and I know that's a big roadblock for a lot of practitioners, especially when their clients say, well, I don't like this and I don't like that. So it sounds like you guys have created a solution for situations like that. Is that correct?

Oh, a million percent. Yeah. I can show you if you want. Do you want me to share my screen?

Go for it. Absolutely.

Cool. If you're watching on video, this will be helpful for you. If you're listening on audio, I will do my best to narrate. So, food planning tool. Practitioners who are listening, if you have ever tried to build anyone a low fodmap, gluten free, dairy free, egg free meal plan, then you know the struggle, like, and you want them to get 100 grams of protein a day and 3 grams of omega 3s, like, and 30 gram of fiber. I mean, you could spend an entire day on that, particularly if you have a client who is very picky about what they will eat. And so I think for a lot of us, the problem we run into when we're trying to do food is medicine is that it just takes a ton of time to do this manually and to do it right. And so when Rupa came out with the food plan, I went from spending, you know, four hours or my RDs at one point, when I was able to finally hire people to work with me, spending four hours on a meal plan to literally minutes. And it was such a game changer because I think a lot of us talk about food as medicine, but I think that as a functional medicine community, we need to level up. The way that we're doing is not just handing your client a Monash low FODMAP meal plan and saying, good luck. It is not handing somebody a list of foods that they should eat on the Mediterranean diet. That doesn't work. People have this information already. You need to sit down with them and customize it so that they can truly start today with something that's truly going to work for them at the spot that they're at. And that's how you get real change. So all you have to do with this tool is type in, like, you know, low fodmap five meals a day. They maybe really like smoothies. You can put in their preferences, any restrictions they've got. And people are so surprised to hear that this is free. So that's the number one thing that, like, blows people's minds. When I'm at conferences and I'm showing practitioners this, they're like, all I have to do is sign up for free and I get to use this. I'm like, yeah, you can put calories and nutrients. And you and I, I know, are both, like, addicted to nutrient data. Because it is not enough to just get someone enough calories or you have to make sure they're getting enough vitamins A through K, minerals, calcium through zinc, omega 3s, like, enough of the meat, amino acids. And so, so many of the meal planning tools on the market do not do that. But you can tell our meal planner I want them to get 4 grams of omega 3s and I want them to get a hundred grams of protein per day. You guys can hear me typing if you're listening to this. And then you just click generate food plan. And so in the course of a visit, this will take about a minute or two to fully populate. And it's going to give your client, like, exact amounts of foods to use, as particularly if you give it a calorie requirement, which is really nice. And then you can just either, like, send it or download it, print it for your client. I have mine on my fridge, and everyone who comes to my house is obsessed with it, which is not what I expected. They're like, can I take a picture of your meal plan? It's beautiful. And I'm like, absolutely. Like, it's not built for you, but, like, you could use the recipes for sure. So while you're sitting with your client explaining to them, hey, your test results came back. Here are the specific things I think you need to do with your food to be successful. The meal planning tool is building them an exact plan for doing it. So, yeah, like, I'm curious, in your practice, like, how do you see people building meal plans right now? Are they going in and, like, using a tool and kind of building it by hand or, like, what are folks doing?

Yeah. So in. In our. In our. Specifically in our practice, we have a. We have a series of recipes that we give to people, and they get to choose, like, what they want to eat based on those recipes that we assign to them. It's definitely not getting this granular, which I really love, because I'm actually part of a challenge right now called Lean Life. And our coaches give us, you know, they give us, like, hey, you've got to eat this many calories. You've got to do this, this, this, and this. So they break down our macros, but then we've got to go and build us all ourselves, and you're just kind of winging it and trying to guess. And. And by the end of the days, you've got this either macro excess or. Or not enough. And so I love this. This is really cool to. I'm so excited to show this to my team and so excited to show it to the practitioners. If you're watching this or listening to this on a podcast, or if you're driving and you're listening to this, just pull over and replay the last three or four minutes, and you'll see this building in real time. So I'm super stoked to see that. And I would assume that we can plug in, like, food sensitivities that people might have. We can plug in. We can plug in if they're vegetarian or vegan. And. And it takes all those factors into account.

Yep. I could say remove almonds. Make it so, like, you can it. The. You talk to it the way you would talk to chat GPT. So say like remove almonds, make it vegan, increase protein by 20%. Right. And they just click update. So this is what I would do with my clients in the office is I would have the meal planner build it, but then we would go through it together before they walked out the door. Because what they might say is, yeah, good try. But like it gave me, you know, oranges to eat twice a week for a snack. I hate oranges. Or you know, something you never. This will help you uncover.

Right?

So you can see it's already swapping almonds for sunflower seeds because I told it to. So this is really cool and I, I think we'll probably eventually put this in the patient portal. Right now we're building out the patient portal within RUPA where people can track their lab results over time so you can see trends. So you can like, if you order the same test for your client repeatedly like every six months or every year, it allows you to see it on a trend and it's really, it's a beautiful interface.

I love that. So when, when it prints, I know it's still building it out, but I know it's got the option there to download the PDF. Um, how does that showcase does it? Because you said people are taking pictures of yours Cause it's so beautiful. So I'm like so curious as to what the final product looks like that you hand to the client.

I'll show you. You can hit download PDF. So I'll show you what it looks like when you put in that you wanted to give you amounts of foods to match calories. It makes it longer so it often doesn't fit on one page. So that's why mine was two pages. That's probably why people notice it when they walked in my house because they're like, what's this beautiful blue like two page thing? But yeah, what you could do as well is you can copy paste this into a treatment plan or you could attach it to a treatment plan if you're using an ehr, right. I mean I, I don't think I printed anything for a client in the last two years I was in practice. I like sent everything electronic. One day we'll make this, we could probably make this even prettier one day where it's got a good background and stuff.

Yeah, well, I think the first step is just getting it done right and getting it in, into people's hands. So this is really cool. I'm, I'm so excited. I can see this being like almost like a, a high value. Well, certainly a high value ad for paying clients, but it could almost even be a loss leader for a practitioner trying to attract new patients and saying, hey, like as a special bonus, we're gonna do this for you when you get on a call with us. So I can see the, the marketing implications of this because it doesn't really take a lot of, I mean, obviously took a lot of manpower to build this, but now that it's available to practitioners, it's like a, you know, as you, as you mentioned, like it easy as like just the five step process of putting the inputs in. Absolutely.

Yeah. That's what we want this to be. Because what we really need people's brains on is the diagnostic workup. Right. So like being doing the medical detective work and then connecting. Right. That heart center connection with your client and the coaching. So the less time you spend on admin on actually building this food plan, which for me was already like, that was always happening in isolation at like 10:00pm, you know, like.

Right.

My clients, I'd be present with them and in order to be present with them, I had to then do this on my off hours, which meant I was spending less time with my family, I was spending less time with my clients. I had to limit my schedule. And you can get really intense with these meal plans too, like depending on really what you want to get for your clients. A lot of my clients were very sick. They couldn't afford supplements. They wanted to get literally every single nutrient they needed in a day through food, which is very difficult to do that from trying to track with chronometer and probably hit all our micros for the day. It's, it's intense. So this gave me back hours a week, which I was then able to use to see more patients and train more providers and hire more providers and scale. Because truly what I think we need as docs to scale, a lot of it is time.

Yep.

Yeah.

Well, simplicity scales. Right. And this keeps things pretty simple and reduces the manpower and intellectual power that's required and transfers it. Transfers it to probably a tool that's more reliable and doesn't take vacations and doesn't take time off. Right. Weekends off, stuff, stuff like that. Which is awesome. I'm curious because my brain is now, now spinning. Does this produce a shopping list for people?

We are getting that integration soon. So not yet, but we are working on that because that is a requested feature. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess like you solve one problem and every time you solve a problem it creates another One. And it creates another one. It creates another one.

That's the thing. We want this. That's why up here, there's like, share feedback. We have that button everywhere because we build. We build for practitioners based on what practitioners tell us. We are addicted to feedback.

Right. I love that.

We don't build anything that's superfluous. Like, everything has a purpose. So our roadmap is determined by the request that we get. So that's a brilliant one. Eventually, we want to be able to integrate that where you can literally, like, add things to a cart and get them delivered.

Right.

Which, like, how seamless would that be? How much easier could you make food as medicine for your client if that's literally the process? Like, all they do is click. Okay, yeah, cool. Buy all those foods, get them delivered.

Yeah. And then it gets delivered in a drone. Right.

At some point, already made into meals. Yeah, we'll get there.

I know somebody's probably working on that one, right?

Yeah, I'll check with my team. We might be on it. I'm not sure.

Well, I love. I can see why you're so enthusiastic about this, because I'm super pumped up now to see this. I think this is a relatively new integration that you guys have done.

Yeah. Another tool that your practitioners might be interested in. I don't know how often your practitioners are customizing blood lab panels, but because we offer so many different lab companies. Tests. Right. We're a. We're a hub for over 30 different lab companies, over 3,000 tests. It can be overwhelming when you're like, all right, who. Who should I use to do, like, a homocysteine B12 folate? Like, maybe your client can't get to a LabCorp, and you want to know how else you would do that? All you have to do is type in, like, what biomarkers you want to check and let me show you in real time. And then click, search for panels. And it's going to tell you your options and where they can get it drawn, how much it's going to be, and then you just literally create the panel and order it right from there. So this is the type of thing that, like, in a demo with a prac, they brought up that they needed a hundred other pracs of the same thing. So we built it. So I like it because it's informed consent. Right. So, like, you can click. I would. I had two monitors in my practice, and one I would just flip around to the client, and we would go through this kind of stuff together. And I would say, this is how much this is going to cost you. You know, this is why I truly think you need this 53 panel. Like, it's going, I'm not going to order you anything ever that is not going to change your treatment plan. And then when we order things, it will be at the best price for you or in the best format for you. And. And people could see that dedication throughout this. I think they really appreciated that. Even when we would go through, like, a specialty lab. Right. Do you need a stool test or a hormone test? The price was right there. They could see I wasn't marking it up. They felt really empowered. I could send them home with a lab comparison sheet where they're looking at their four options for stool testing. The price is there, the number of biomarkers is there. They can bring that home to their partner and they can have the conversation of like, hey, you know, I've had IBD forever. I met with this doc who taught me that there's going to be, you know, four options that are really good for me for assessing my microbiome and my gut inflammation. This is how much each of them costs. This is how many biomarkers are in each of them. Like, let's make a decision as a family if we think this is the right thing to invest in right now. And it takes the pressure off and it really makes people feel like they're in charge of their health. In my experience, it's also really great for practitioners because, you know, it's like every other day there's a new test coming out and you're like, which one contains zonulin? You know, try to think, like, which one should you use for your individual client who's sitting in front of you with unique history inside of needs? So I really see this as the future because we're generally dealing with highly educated customers and clients who really want to be empowered. They truly want to understand their career. We are their doctor's teacher. Like, this is just a tool that we can use to teach them better.

I love this. And I noticed, like, the. The price points are. Seem to be lower than if a practitioner were to order it from. Directly from the lab. So it sounds like you guys are creating a kind of almost like a buyer's club for practitioners where you've negotiated the best possible rate for people. Is that. Is that a clear understanding?

Yeah, we have. And you can pass this along to your clients. So the thing I love about this the most is because, you know, a comprehensive digestive soul test is going to cost you 300 bucks. There's no way around it. Like, it's going to be that much minimum. So what I love about this is you can go through with your client. They can literally choose from this list. After their informed consent conversation with you about which one you think is best, you add it to their cart. They get your discount, unless you're adding a fee for some reason. But then they can pay for this over three months, interest free. So it, instead of, you know, it's 370 today, make the decision right now. Here's the kit in the office, or forget it. It's like, no, take this home, think about it. And now it's a hundred bucks a month for the next three months rather than all of this money up front. So this is how like, easy and amazing it can be. And what I really like too is I'm somebody who, when I'm sitting in a, like a CEU presentation, if I'm learning, I'm taking furious notes, but then I want it to be clinically applicable, like immediately. So what I do now is like, I create panels based on what I'm learning. So if I'm sitting there and I'm like learning about lp, right? Like, I'm going to add it to my existing cardiac panel, but I'm going to go through and like, choose, you know, what biomarkers I want included, customize it, create the panel right there so I never have to, you know, do it again. I just, it's in my system now. I can share it with the rest of my clinic staff. And this is the way that, like you said, one clinician to a presentation, they gather all the information, they make it applicable. Boom, it's shared with your clinic, you're ready to start using it for your clients. And like, we have to do this because there are so many sick people. Our understanding of functional medicine is evolving so quickly. Like, if we don't sprint this stuff and make it so that you can rapidly implement and scale, you know, we're not helping people.

I 100% agree. So the, the question that's coming up for me is who is RUPA available to, what type of practitioners, and are there any geographic restrictions or limitations?

So it depends on the product you're using within rupa. So our magazine, where we have articles and protocols, is public. Anyone can access that. The food plan is available for people who sign up for rupa and then lab testing is available to people with an NPI number who are trained in how to order and interpret labs. We have an Additional service called Physician Services, where you can pay for a physician to sign the order and review it for red flags, which as a solo prac, I found very helpful. Like, no longer was I lying awake at night wondering if, like, there was a result coming in I needed to catch the next morning. Right. Like, that was such a cool backup for me to have. So there's different tiers of access, and patients can access the patient portal if they want to track the results over time. And we're making it so that in a few weeks you can upload, like, your LabCorp results, your quest results, and it will put them in a results over time trend tracker. Right now, we only serve the U.S. but Canada is on our roadmap. Like, we're coming for you Canadian doctors. Like, we hear you, we love you, we want to be there. So that's coming soon too. But you can sign up as a Canadian practitioner, and if you have US Clients for some reason, then you can order for them through the interface. It just has to be shipped within the US like if it's a kit. And then you can use any of the free tools that you want.

Oh, very good, Very good. I mean, I'm ready, I'm ready to just like, jump right into this and start, start exploring it. So what are some of your other favorite features? I know we, we covered a lot there in that short amount of time, but is there anything else that jumps out to you that practitioners should know about?

I think we, we do a lot of free education, so. And I know you do too. We have, we have our learn about lab section where, Let me ask you this. How many of your practitioners who listen to you are like, brand new to functional medicine?

Oh, good question. I would say they're probably not new to functional medicine, but there's, there's a spectrum, right? So there's people that are just getting into it, and there's people that are not into it yet, but they want to get into it. And then there's people that are seasoned vets. But here's the thing. There's new labs coming out all the time. So you always, almost as a clinician, feel like you're behind the eight ball. So even if you're comfortable with what you knew last year, with all the new labs that are coming out, I mean, you're always kind of up. Upping your knowledge, right?

Yeah, a hundred percent. So that's what we have too. We have, I mean, we have practitioners who've maybe they've been practicing as a gynecologist. For 30 years. But they're trying to get into gut health now. Right? So now they're like, where do I even start with understanding gut health?

Right.

I have my specialty now. I want to expand. We have new practice coming to us. We have practice who've been really in a more allopathic focused practice and now they're trying to open their own functional medicine clinic. So our reference guide is really great because it's all free information, whether it's a free live class on a topic. We had like Akkermansia for mimicking GLP one activity the other day, which was really cool. We have bootcamps, which are six week courses where you get a test kit for yourself, you do the test on yourself, and then you go through it with a practitioner for six weeks, which our pracs really like. Because you never want to order a test for the first time for a client. Like, or at least I don't. I feel like I understand the collection process so I can answer questions about that, although I never really have to when I use Roopa. Because our customer service team handles literally any issue your client has. So, like, they have a question about the test, we talk to them. They mess up their test, they need a new kit, we handle it for free. Like, for me, the customer service aspect was also huge because you know how it is. It's like somebody messes up their Dutch test, you got to like go get another test, ship it to them, explain it. You know, it's a lot of work that's not paid for a practitioner, which is when you're starting out, the type of work you have to avoid if you're going to survive in your business. So the bootcamp is nice because you get the experience of collecting it, sending it in. You get six weeks with an expert to ask questions live, and then you get all the prerecorded content so you really understand the test. So that is often a favorite of people who are starting out and they're exploring a new realm of functional medicine or a new type of testing. We have the lab comparison tool so that you can choose which test you think is right even without being super familiar. Right. You can literally see a list of all the attributes. And then we have protocols, which I think is the biggest thing. So protocols and condition write ups. So somebody called this the natural up to date to my face. And I was like, that is the best compliment I've ever gotten. I didn't even build this. I wrote some of the articles. But like, wow. And that's what we're trying to do is. Is make it so easy again. If you're new to functional medicine and you're trying to help your clients with their cholesterol, like, how do you just know exactly what to do and how to help them in an hour or less? And so that's what this is built to do.

This is super awesome. It's, like, so, like, clean, so straightforward. I can see there's a lot of thought that continues to go into developing the product and the service, but also a lot of thought has gone into the platform and how it's been designed and so supportive of practitioners and their journey. I'd love to hear if you have, like, a great case study that you can share of a practitioner who started you maybe went from a traditional way of using labs and is now using rupa. Is there somebody that jumps out to you? Maybe it's you, maybe it's somebody else that you can think of.

I am my own case study. I'm happy to talk about me, and then I can talk to you about some of the people in our mentorship group because we have a. Julie Davey is our practitioner for our GI Health boot camp. And we basically just built this for her because her students wanted more of her. So now we have her meeting with a group of, like, 20 people each month. And it's really cool. They're iterating so fast that it's easy for me to talk about them. For me, I was a solo prac, took out a loan to start my business. I was by myself and was splitting my time between admin and marketing and treating. And the way I chose to do medicine was based on my own experience, which is, like, very grassroots, very, like, ground up. So, you know, food is medicine, which meant everybody got a meal plan that got them 100 of the nutrients they needed in a day. Everyone got a very intensive intake, like 300 questions. Because to me, I'm like, I'm not messing around when you're coming in my clinic, you're getting better. And when you come in for the first visit, I'm gonna have all the information I need to get you there. And then we are going to move as quickly as possible with as many interventions as possible as minimal testing and, like, supplements and things you need to buy as possible so that we can get the best outcomes. And we would track how much it cost. And my goal was to get people well for under a grand. So that was really difficult when I was spending a ton of time meal planning, answering questions about labs, stocking Kits in my office and administering them and trying to charge for them and track all of that. So rupa, when they came on board to my practice, it saved me 15 hours a week. And with that 15 hours a week, I was able to see more people, which allowed me to scale, which allowed me to hire, which allowed me to then refine my processes even more. I was no longer doing the meal planning, my RDs were doing it. I had an intern to help with my intake. So like within a year and a half, I think I went from just me to staff of five and we were servicing a company that had 14 locations. So we were working with a functional medicine company within an intensive outpatient, in an intensive outpatient therapy company. Sorry, that was a tough sentence for me to get out. So. And Sonari was the, the name of the company I was working with had served over 8,000 clients. And within our first few months there we were, we had over 800 clients in our system just for functional medicine. So that is an example of like when we save somebody with a passion and a mission, when we save them time and we get out of their way, right, get that admin stuff out of their way, they can take off. What I'll say is another example is we have some practitioners who. I brought up the OBGYNs on purpose. We have three OBGYNs in our mentorship who have all been practicing for at least two decades and they all are realizing that gut health is so integral to hormonal health that they need to sort of double down on understanding how to assess gut health, how to fix what comes up on a test. You know, some of these stool tests are going to give you hundreds of biomarkers. So it's like, whoa, what do you do with this? Right? Like they've got a parasite and inflammation and signs of food allergies and leaky gut. Like how do you even fix that if you're used to five minute visits where you maybe do one or two interventions? So what they're able to do now is really hone down their protocols and their decision making trees. So like if this, then that. And so they're able to now implement gut health testing in their practice. Very cool. Quickly, because of our education and then the way we set it up so that you can pick an order test very fast.

I'm curious, just trying to ponder in my head why, unless somebody doesn't live in the US obviously, why wouldn't they sign up for rupa? Like what would stop somebody from doing this?

I don't know. To be honest, because it's free and you could at least use the education. I think one thing we haven't done well is explain to, like, a regular primary care practitioner who has no interest in functional medicine, why they would need this. And I won't blame just Rupert for that. I think as an industry, we're trying to do that better. But, for example, I have a couple of pediatricians in my ADHD bootcamp right now, and I'm so thrilled that they're there because they are learning how to use nutrition and exercise and function medicine lab testing to get their clients amazing outcomes, sometimes without medications, but they're unique. They're the outliers. Like, they signed up because they wanted the information. Whereas I don't think we're. We're doing a good job of reaching the practitioners who might just feel like, I don't have time to learn this stuff. We're not teaching about it in traditional medical schools. And so someone could graduate and be a psychiatrist and not know how to test for copper and zinc in a way that is actually going to give them a good clinical, clinically applicable outcome. Right. So we could talk about all the nutrients. Right? Like, how do you test for magnesium? You know, like, why would you choose RBC over serum? That's not traditional education. So I think part of it is just the lack of knowledge and maybe a lack of understanding how powerful this can be for clients, which is why I'm so proud that we do case studies, because I think that's really helpful. The last thing I'll say, we publish case studies for free. So if your practitioners have case studies they're particularly proud of, they can submit them to us, we'll publish them. When I did that for Rupa, Rupa very quickly became my number one referral source. So people call my clinic, and because we have millions and millions of readers of our magazine, and so people would call my clinic saying, I read your story, your case study of Mary and her panic attacks. I want you to do the same thing for me. And, like, you know, as a practitioner, like, you cannot pay enough for that type of marketing for you to literally attract the exact type of client that you're capable of helping. It's wild. So I really appreciated that. And I feel like any of your practitioners who are listening, who want to give us their case studies, like, all you have to do is follow our guidelines. If they meet our guidelines, we will publish them. And you will reach so many people, because so many people are suffering and they are looking online for help.

So true. So, so true. What a. What a great system. What a great opportunity. What a great time to be alive, right? To be able to offer this. I. Now I. Now I get it. Now I see why you're so. So pumped and excited. And it's. It's got me pumped and excited. I'm. I'm like, in. In one way, I'm, like, almost excited to get off of this call with you so I can run upstairs and tell my wife and. And. And tell my audience. Like, you guys have to watch this. Like, this is such a total game changer. So where. Where. Where do we direct people? Where can they get signed up?

Yeah, so it's just rupahealth.com r u p a health dot com. You can start there. If you want to get education directly, you could go to rupau university.com and that's where we have a lot of our free live classes and our magazine articles that you can access for free. You don't even have to access them within the portal. Yeah, head on over. We can't wait to meet you and help you help your clients.

Awesome. What does RUPA stand for? Is it an acronym for something? I'm curious.

It's. Tara is our founder. It's her mom's nickname. And the reason that she chose that name is because growing up, Tara and Tara's okay with me telling the story. She tells it publicly. And I think all of us at the company are really aligned with how purpose and mission driven RUPA is because of this story. So Tara's dad was a pediatric ER doc in Texas, and it was like something like he. He was, like, working in the only hospital for miles and miles and miles. He had a ton of responsibility and just is like this titan of knowledge and could fix anything. And so Tara just grew up with, like, this ultimate faith in her dad, and he's an excellent clinician. But then she and her mom actually both developed chronic illnesses. And despite the fact that her dad was this, like, this huge, amazing superman of medicine, he did not know how to help them. And they felt stuck. And what they realized on that journey is how difficult it is to find a functional medicine provider, how difficult it is to even know that you need one to begin with, how hard it is to get access to the testing that will help you discover your root cause if you have a chronic illness. And just like, how many barriers are in the way to people healing. And when they found a functional medicine practitioner, both of them healed. And so it's from that place of Passion. And I think that that sense of, like, we need to get this to more people, that's what fuels us as a company now every single day.

Well, I'm certainly excited to help spread the word and put this in front of our clinicians and utilize some of the services that are available to us as Canadians. So thank you for the work that you're doing. Thanks for your amazing enthusiasm. And here's to helping more people and making health decentralized, democratized, accessible, affordable, and all the things that we want it to be. You know, and, and I feel like the, the thing that was missing and, and is now available to, to more people is technology. I think technology and software is going to be what creates that tipping point that makes our services more affordable and accessible to people. And, and I think that this nimbleness allows us to do more for people to grow our practices or make our services more affordable or have more free time. Nothing wrong with that either, right? If you have those extra 15 hours, you want to spend them with your kids or go for a walk or take a day off or two days off. 15 hours would be two days off. Then you have that freedom back. So thank you for making this opportunity available and thank you to the team at RUPA as well.

I will pass it on. And thank you for the work that you're doing. We are huge fans of you over here. And what you're doing to help practitioners live better lives and build perfect practices and reach more people is such a critical part of helping the planet heal. So thank you.

Thank you. My pleasure. It's an honor. I appreciate it. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

You too.