From Renting a Room to Owning a Multi-Disciplinary Concussion Clinic

Over the last five years, my practice has significantly. I had been working for many years, sort of renting a room within someone else's space. And then now, almost two years now, I have my own space. So have my own And now I have a Physio working in the clinic and a clinical social worker, collaboration with OT. So I really feel like that was a huge jump and I'm super excited how this is going to evolve in the future. Hi, I'm Melissa Biscardi. I'm a registered nurse, manual osteopath, and I just finished my PhD. I'm in Toronto, Canada, and I help go-getters recover from a concussion and reclaim their lives. What I think sets my practice apart from other clinicians that are working with concussion or concussion-focused clinics is that I use a lot of objective measures, which can be really helpful in identifying the nuances in how an injury is manifesting and then also tracking progress over time. When I was first starting out, think one of the biggest limitations for me was around my mindset ⁓ and thinking either how far I could go or even are people going to be willing to pay a certain amount for my services. was hard on myself. lot of self-limiting beliefs. when it comes to social media, I always say like there are so many good things about it that sort of balance the doom scrolling and things that can happen. And I was following Megan Walker and I would see that she would be at these events and one day I sent her a DM and I said, how can I learn about those events before you've been at them? And then she said, ⁓ I actually have this mastermind and we're just opening the doors. so I was already sold So working with clinicians, business labs, and the whole team, and of course Megan, there's a lot of strategic planning that goes on, which definitely that was not part of my life before. And some changes that I implemented early on were raising my prices and not looking at what everyone else was charging, and starting to think about how I organize my care in terms of a system and a reproducible system, which might have been in my mind before, but it wasn't documented. One thing that I think has really manifested itself in me is the ability to make decisions faster and take risks because without risk, there's no reward. So I'm definitely trying to lean in to risk as well as pivot when needed. For example, in 2020, we all had to pivot online and that was great, right? People could still access care. We could still deliver care. So that really has, I feel like, been a big growth point for me. what patients value the most is it's a real personalized approach when people come in. So when we're making a plan for them, those exercises and strategies are based on their unique experience and every concussion is different, just like every snowflake is different and every person is different And consistently patients have said that they really appreciate that personalized approach. think another thing people really appreciate is that here we focus on concussions. We see concussions from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. And I always say, if I need knee surgery, I want surgery with the guy who does surgery on knees all day. And I do think immersion. matters and also gives confidence to people who are coming in that that we've seen at least something similar before, even if it's a unique case. And I always say concussion recovery is the first step. And then Like neural performance comes after, right? Because usually People get really excited to think that we can help them feel even better than they did before.