Free Range Health

Free Range Health seeks to overcome mobility challenges that create barriers between patients and affordable, high quality acupuncture and East Asian medicine services. We do this by decentralizing our approach to health care and offering our services at a significantly reduced rate from the private market. Patients can afford to come as often as needed, and they no longer need to travel to their provider for treatment. We bring the services to where it is most convenient for the patient and primary caregivers.

First, we partner with local senior centers and other community spaces to host our mobile community acupuncture clinics. This allows people with limited mobility the opportunity to access our services in a place they already have a plan for attending. By layering our services into the services of our host location, our patients do not need to overcome the burden of travelling long distances in order to access valuable services.

Next, our In-Home Treatments, teleHerb® service, and teleNutrition™ service are designed to meet the needs of patients unable to leave their homes. Instead of placing the burden on the patient or caregiver to come up with a strategy for bringing the patient to the provider, we shoulder the burden by bringing care to the patient. Many homebound individuals go without essential care because it is too difficult to leave the house. We solve this problem for them.

Finally, we are working to build a national organization of chapters in every state with integrative and alternative providers that will begin to standardize this model and bring it to the wider population.

At this time our capabilities are limited. As a young organization defining a unique approach to providing services, we lack much of the infrastructure and support that more established causes may have. Every step of the way is a step into the unknown, which requires an efficient use of resources and community support. As awareness of our work and our decentralized approach is spreading, we hope to attract more support from new sources.

Currently, our top priority is to create financially sustainable services by reducing repetitive business processes using cloud-based automation technology. Free Range Health takes advantage of the Salesforce Foundation donation of Salesforce.com access. We have devoted significant resources to customizing the platform to our specific business processes and needs.

At the end of 2018, we have completed the donor management and reporting phase of this transformation. Our donation tracking, donation acknowledgements, and donor cultivation are now automated, which is providing considerable returns on the investment. We are saving many employee hours and the associated costs, and these resources can be redirected to expanding and improving our services to patients and communities.

The next steps we will take involve several other areas of our organization. First, we will begin automating our patient intake process. We have completed the process of translating our documents into Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian. Soon, patients will be able to fill out documents and answer health questions in the language that is most convenient for them. After that, we will begin automating our provider processes to help collect deeper patient health information to be used for diagnosis and selection of treatment protocols.

We will also be automating our grant seeking processes. This will allow for better tracking and management of our outside funding efforts, and it will allow us to better consolidate and roll-out program related content in a quick and easy manner.

These improvements are expensive, and they mean we have not focused heavily on expanding our core services. In reality, we can't realistically begin a true expansion until these processes are automated. Even though our model is very inexpensive compared to other centralized health care services, the overhead costs are still too great to sustain with rapid expansion.

Automation technology will allow us to scale our organization and services to wherever we are invited in the future.

In the 8 years since we began offering our services, we have expanded to three locations providing over 70 low-cost treatments each week. Over that 8 year period, we have provided over 25,000 low-cost treatments to more than 2,500 people. We now have 8 volunteers. We have successfully designed a working model of how to expand to new locations, and we are poised to begin ramping up our telemedicine and in-home services.

We are building a network of supporters who value the work we do and support that work financially. Our donations and grant revenue has increased year-after-year, and we hope to continue that trend as we move into 2018.

We are still struggling to fully realize our vision of using technology to unify our administrative infrastructure. This is a massive undertaking, but when it is accomplished, it will pave the way to easily and quickly build chapters across the nation.

We are also limited in the number of clinics we can open. This is because our programs have grown to the point where they are mostly self-sufficient, but there is not yet the community support to cover the costs of recruiting and supporting highly trained, well-qualified acupuncture professionals at a living wage. This makes it very difficult to expand to new locations as the requests come in. We have streamlined our expenses to maximize the value of investing in one of our clinics, but we do not yet have the resources to start-up and nurture new clinics while they build the necessary patient base and community awareness.