In this episode of the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, host Steven Schwartz interviews Dr. Nina Crowley, a nutrition expert and director at SECA, a company specializing in body composition analysis. Nina shares her journey from being a dietitian to working in health psychology and eventually joining SECA. The conversation delves into the importance of body composition analysis in healthcare, particularly in concierge medicine, and how it can enhance patient outcomes. Nina explains the technology behind body composition devices, the metrics they provide, and real-world applications in medical practices. The episode also discusses marketing strategies for integrating body composition services into healthcare practices.
 

Chapters

 

00:00 Introduction to Nina Crowley and Her Journey
03:09 Understanding Body Composition Analysis
06:07 The Technology Behind Body Composition Devices
09:19 Integrating Body Composition in Concierge Medicine
12:25 Real-World Applications and Success Stories
15:29 Marketing Body Composition Services
18:20 Conclusion and Resources
 

Steven Schwartz (00:24)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steven Schwartz, and it’s my privilege and honor to have Dr. Nina Crowley here to be my guest today on the podcast. Nina, thank you for being here.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (00:37)
Thanks for having me, Steven. I’m excited to talk to you today.

Steven Schwartz (00:40)
Thanks so very much. You’re with SECA and you were telling me off camera about this amazing body composition analysis machine that your company has and the company’s been around what, 185 years? Is that what I heard? So I want to dig into the machine and the company and whatnot, but it’s best in my opinion, let’s start first. Let’s get to know you and your journey. Where did you grow up? What made you want to get involved in?

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (00:53)
That’s right.

Steven Schwartz (01:09)
medical field and how on earth did you end up at SECA? Tell us that story, please.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (01:14)
I’d love to. So yeah, so I can start growing up on Long Island. I went to Cornell for undergrad and majored in nutrition. So I became a dietician. That required going after my bachelors, going back to school for about a year. I got my master’s and I got my internship, did a 900 or so hour supervised practice to become a registered dietician.

And then I started working in an inpatient setting, which I didn’t love. And I moved down south. Growing up on Long Island, it’s not super affordable. So sometimes we look to move south and I found a really special place in Charleston, South Carolina, which is where I still live. So I ended up working at the Medical University of South Carolina here in Charleston as a dietitian for a bariatric surgery program. And in that program, I was working with patients who had surgical weight loss.

leading up to surgery long-term, these were patients who were ours for life. But I found that even my training as a dietitian was not enough to really help them with their long-term behavior change that they needed to undergo with surgery. And there was a lot of complexities to severe obesity that I just needed a little bit more. So I went back to school while I was working for my PhD in health psychology. And by the time I finished that, I had thought I’d go into academia or somewhere else. I ended up really getting

passionate about running our program and trying to fix a lot of the things that I thought needed some help. So I used my psychology degree to work as a director of the bariatric program. So all in all, I was at MUSC for about 20 years, loved the population of patients who had surgical weight loss, but really wanted to get into a place where I could do a little more creative, innovative stuff. And so I ended up finding SECA or SECA found me. SECA as a…

company had a headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. They’ve been there 185 years making like weighing and measuring equipment. So I found out my daughter was weighed on a SECA device as a baby. Now that I work for them, that came full circle. But I work in the division that does body composition equipment. So they’ve been around about 20 years doing that. And I can tell you about what that that entails. I came on as director of clinical education and partnerships. So I work with

physicians and advanced practice providers, dieticians, really any clinician and some non-clinicians who have our device in a fitness setting or aesthetics. We work a lot in primary care, direct primary care, concierge practice like you’re involved in. We’re also in a lot of weight management type programs, surgical and non-surgical, and kind of everything in between. These days, once I made that jump a couple years ago, three years ago,

It was really around the time where the new generation of GLP-1 receptor agonists or anti-obesity medications, whatever we want to call them. There’s a lot of terms for that. People often call it an ozempic, which is maybe a pet peeve of mine. But anyway, in this space nowadays, there is a lot of talk about weight loss, weight maintenance, weight management. And where we come in is to help them monitor their body composition and make sure that

the weight that they’re losing is coming from excess adipose tissue or fat and not so much from their fat free mass or their lean mass or their muscle mass. And so I’ll give you the whole lowdown on why we all should be doing body composition, but that’s kind of how I landed at SECA. And I worked really with the community of medical providers to educate on body composition in general. And then once somebody gets one of our devices, we do special training for them to.

know how to use the device, make sure they’re using it in their practice, using their communication skills to talk about weight and these numbers in a positive way. So I really do get to use my psychology degree a little more than I thought I would in this role. So it’s been great and I love talking to folks like you, getting people educated about body composition and why we all should be using it instead of BMI.

Luckily, the medical field has advanced a lot in the past couple years and we’re finally starting to see that standard of practice shift away from just looking at somebody’s weight and kind of looking bigger picture.

Steven Schwartz (05:41)
Fascinating. I love your story, and it was this, but then that. So I did this, and then went here. And it’s just like a beautiful pathway that you went through, and you seem very happy and very fulfilled with your role at SECA. One question I had for the body composition analysis, what are the major items or metrics that it’s capturing through that machine?

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (06:07)
Sure. So big picture, we first want to talk about body composition is what is that made up of, right? So our body is made up of fat mass and everything else that’s called fat free mass. We can tailor that down a little bit further and look at total body water. And then we can look at skeletal muscle. Those are kind of the big factors. What our device does is what’s called bioimpedance analysis or BIA. And what bioimpedance is, is it measures the electrical conductance

of a low dose electrical current through your body’s tissues. And so through that, you can measure how fast or slow it goes through muscle, water, and fat. And these are calculations then that go into predictive formulas for estimating your body’s composition. So there’s really no, there’s no great direct measurement of your body composition other than autopsy, they say. But what we do then is these predictive equations to get as close to the gold standard.

don’t even love that term, the validated measures. So for body fat, one of the ways we do that is for compartment model. We look at these four different ways that you would do in like an all-day research test, right? That’s sort of our gold standard metric. And then we estimate body fat with bioimpedance, about 98 % is close to that.

With muscle mass, it’s important that we are looking at like a whole body MRI is the best way to measure muscle mass. So our device is validated to that as well. And so that’s kind of the big things that you’re looking at. So you’d get on this device, it looks like a scale. You take your socks and shoes off and you’re gonna hold the grips. So you have two points of contact on each hand, two points of contact on each feet. And then the electrical current goes through the body in less than a minute.

and then you’ll be able to put your demographic information in and then go look at it on a cloud-based software and it’s gonna spit out the results. So one thing we like to talk to patients or providers about really is that you can customize what you’re looking at. So our device shows you 19 different things. That would be things like your total fat mass, your percent body fat. We even have a visceral adipose tissue assessment, which is…

looking at the fat around your internal organs. And that’s done with the measurement of a waist circumference added into that formula. With muscle mass, we’re looking at the skeletal muscle mass total body, but we’re also looking at through the different limbs. So we’re able to say arms, legs, and torso. So if someone has an imbalance or is working on upper or lower body strength, you’re able to assess that as well. And then you can kind of dive deeper into total body water. You can look at intra and extracellular water.

Those are components of it. You can look at phase angle, which is a kind of complicated measure, but that has to do with the cellular health of an individual. You can look at resting energy expenditure. So we have formulas that use the fat mass and the fat-free mass to look at how many calories your body’s burning on a day, average day. So those are some of the metrics that you can use. And as I’m totally overwhelming you with all of that clinical data,

The thing that I wanted to say was actually that what I love about our software is that you can customize it. So as the behavioral trained person, I would never spit out all 20 things to any patient. would always sort of call that down to probably about six or seven really concrete items that the provider feels, that the clinician feels confident in talking to them about, but really that are connected to something they can change. So those conversations are really important.

and being able to focus on these particular metrics and connecting that to what you’re talking about in the rest of your time with the patient, think that’s really where it’s at.

Steven Schwartz (09:57)
Fascinating. Truly, that you can stand on a scale-like device, hold onto the grips for a minute, and have all this data immediately available to you wherever you are on the planet after logging in is fascinating. And I love it. Saying before geeking out on early internet stuff, but this takes the cake too, that you’re looking at the composition truly of your body and the major components of your body.

And I assume, you know, come back once a week, once a month, and keep charting your change in growth as diet changes, as exercise changes, as mental health therapy is done, and people’s lives are slowly changing, you can see the data change over time.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (10:42)
Yeah.

So two things there, technology wise, what’s also really cool is when I was in school learning about this stuff, 20, 25 years ago, there wasn’t as much ability for this technology. There’s a lot of people who even now to this day learned about this stuff long time ago and are like, the data is not there.

We’ve come a long way that technology has gotten really good. Like I said, 97 or 98 % accurate to those reference metrics is really good data. So that’s a big one is kind of talking to folks about how it’s changed. And hopefully they’re wanting to geek out on learning all about that too. But if not, really just talking to them about having some data points other than someone’s weight to be able to anchor your conversations. And I think that’s huge. we really say, there’s people who would do it weekly, but as again,

My psychologist hat really, along with the science would say probably checking in on your body composition no more frequently than once a month because you really wanna be monitoring for actual changes in your body composition. So weekly changes in body fat and muscle mass are really not happening. That might be more of like a water fluctuations, like your weight changes also because of that.

So we, you I like saying four to six weeks because that’s really, you know, a nice cadence to check in. Everybody that I’ve seen does it, you know, probably a little bit different. So sometimes they’ll, you know, tie this to a program. Sometimes they’ll do it at every visit, maybe every three months. You know, if someone’s not working on a particular plan or program, having it as part of an annual visit or a screening check-in is a nice way to do it. So.

It does fit nicely into the concierge medicine or direct primary care model because it’s a nice feature that you can offer to differentiate from folks down the road who are doing this. People love that data. Of course, my focus is getting them to connect the data to stuff that they’re doing because just having data sometimes is not enough or can, you know, how we sometimes overdo the.

the info technology type stuff, and we’re like, okay, we gotta actually make this actionable. But it’s really nice because if you’re talking to somebody who’s either lost weight or is maintaining weight, and really that’s not your focus anymore, what are the data points that you wanna get excited about to keep moving on eating healthy or working on a particular exercise regimen? You wanna be able to have some metrics to show them to really say like, hey, we can always improve fitness, and here’s the markers for that. And you may see small incremental changes, but.

looking at those type of metrics over time is really cool.

Steven Schwartz (13:26)
I want to have you share a story or two perhaps. Obviously, this is the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. And so we want to tailor our discussion as closely as possible for concierge medical or DPC practices. Do you have a particular story or two that you might like to share with our listeners about how this body composition machine has helped the practitioner somehow?

with their business, with their outcomes, with their profitability. I mean, what can you share? Because people love stories and it’s easy to remember stories.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (14:04)
Yeah, absolutely. And I do have one provider in particular that I’ll give you the link so you can share maybe in the notes who I interviewed. And really his words say it best is how he has integrated body composition into every kind of facet of his practice. But this is somebody who was kind of an early adopter to direct primary care and has always been on the body composition bandwagon. He always says that he wished he implemented it sooner.

But he’s really been able to connect that not just to weight management or obesity care, but really throughout the functional medicine, the integrative medicine side, anti-aging. He’s brought all of that into one practice and been able to track patients’ outcomes. So I think he looks, he’s a big proponent of looking at that visceral adipose tissue because that’s a pretty actionable metric to show someone how kind of their waist circumference and their excess fat around their organs.

changes when they’re able to make dietary changes and move more and get some really good resistance training on board. So that’s a metric that he’s used really with patient outcomes. It’s to keep them motivated and coming back. I think that’s one of the big components to his story that’s worked, showing the muscle mass and change over time, being able to target what actual exercises to do for upper and lower.

body strength based on what their body composition is has been another way to kind of target those outcomes. He’s probably talked to me about the impact on financials, but my outcomes brain was just listening to, he kept his patients coming back. And I think really, you know, keeping them motivated long-term has been one of the biggest, you know, kind of benefits. I’ve got another guy in mind who his

moving from a regular sort of traditional practice to being a concierge practice within a health system. And he’s kind of the leader in that in his area and moving from having body composition in his practice, he’s noticed that he’s able to really get a lot more out of it with more time spent with each patient and having them come back and spend time with them. So he’s been able to say, like he had it before and was able to spend a couple minutes.

but moving to where he has longer with each patient, being able to dive into each of these metrics. I don’t think he’s doing all 19. Again, I don’t recommend that, but I think, you five, six, seven parameters that you can really focus on and spend some time with, because it takes a little while to understand exactly what they mean and comparing that to your reference group. And, you know, one of the big things that we talk about with body composition is who are we comparing you to?

So we know that there’s gender differences in what our body composition should be, age-related, ethnicity as well. So we take those factors into account. So I know for this particular customer of ours, he’s been able to really spend the time, go through all of that, get a good plan together, and then come back and check in. So he’s new to that frame of, new to this side of the business, but that’s been a really big factor for him.

The money comes and I think what I’ve seen a lot of people do is build into their practice model, $100, $150 a year maybe for their body composition assessments and they do an initial and maybe every quarter some would charge maybe a little more than that depending on what area of the country they’re in. But really having this as one of the offerings has positioned them in a way to bring in some additional patients.

that might otherwise go somewhere else. they might be getting a, people sometimes understand body composition. They got this done at a gym somewhere, you maybe on a medical grade device, or these days a lot of people have home devices. And so, you know, they’re a little bit less accurate, lot less accurate, but being able to sort of check in with the clinical grade model in the office has been a really big, you know, kind of selling point to differentiate your practice from.

Steven Schwartz (18:20)
Wow, so many nuggets and I, excuse me, I can’t, I can’t recap so many different things, but one thought I had coming from the marketing point of view is that if a practice wants to grow, they may want to do some sort of a lead magnet on social media or on digital display ads that would basically say, uh, get your body composition analysis 98 % accurate. Um, with our

concierge whatever practice and click here it’s only $49 or something simple and people can then click, add in, contact, pay the money, whatever. But that becomes a lead for people who are showing true interest in their own body and their health. And from there, obviously they come in, get their body analysis done.

get a chance to speak with the physician and learn more about their practice. And what is concierge care? What is this DPC thing? Cause I always thought you get sick, you go to the doctor, you pay your copay. And that’s that. They learned this whole new way of getting medical care. They might say, you know what, let me do this. This is better. So just the idea that you can use this machine, this amazing device that you have as a way of getting leads to lead to other things within the business. Right.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (19:42)
Totally.

Yeah. And we have a marketing toolkit that we provide with some of those assets already developed that you can use. I think another thing that makes us a little different than some of the others out there is that we do have myself and soon to be another person on my team with the clinical education. So this is, we help develop, we do webinars, we do, I have a podcast, I’ll tell you about that at the end. We do a lot of education for them to be able to

Steven Schwartz (19:43)
So.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (20:12)
draw in clients from particular areas and connect why they need body composition and how it can benefit them. So I think that’s another piece is really beyond, you know, kind of the features and benefits. Once somebody knows a little bit about body composition, you know, then we can kind of get deeper and say, how do we connect that to some of these other clinical areas to keep people coming back?

Steven Schwartz (20:35)
I love it. We are running out of time here. So Nina, if somebody wants to learn more about the company, the device, how to market it to grow their practice, what’s the best way for them to either get in touch with you personally or with the company? What’s the best way?

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (20:53)
Sure, so we have a website, it’s SECA S-E-C-A, and then the four letters, M-B-C-A, Medical Body Composition Analysis, so secambca.com. You can also, for me, LinkedIn has been my new favorite social media home for talking to medical folks about body composition. So Nina Crowley is my full name on LinkedIn.

And I do have a podcast called In the Know with Nina. So you can search that on all the platforms where I talk to other folks in the healthcare field about all things sort of weight care, obesity, body composition, and kind of hear some other stories of how people have begun to use that in their practice and seen some good work with the outcomes.

Steven Schwartz (21:37)
Very cool. It’s been my pleasure having you on the podcast today. And as we mentioned, the arm of my company of Concierge Medical Marketing is all about helping concierge and DPC practitioners grow their practice to the way and the size that they want to get to. And we have three programs that we offer. The first is Transition. That is for a doctor who

maybe has two, three, 4,000 patients in a traditional insurance-based practice, and they decide that they’ve had it with doing that and seeing 30 patients a day, and they’d rather have a concierge practice seeing, I don’t know, six or seven patients a day. And so we’re there to help educate and explain the benefits of going to a concierge relationship to those existing folks and help them transition. The second is under the…

program of growth and that’s obviously to help a practice go from 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 patients to the panel size they want maybe 250 300 400 whatever it might be. So we have techniques and methods to help them achieve that and third and final we call nurture nurturing is when a practice has an already full panel they may have a waitlist already and it’s so important that patients renew every year.

It’s always easier to keep an existing patient happy and renewing than it is to find a new one and bring them aboard. And so we have techniques and methods of staying in touch with these patients that are already on your panel and your wait list to keep educating them, keep in touch with them, sharing diet and exercise and cooking tips or having a quarterly wine and cheese party or something with the doctor and other patients. Just different ways.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (23:02)
Mm.

with BodyComp at their visit.

Steven Schwartz (23:30)
Absolutely, bring in the machine, right? And the idea that we can help nurture those relationships so that yet another area of people feeling good about their financial investment in that concierge practice. that’s what we offer. And for for doctors who want to grow their practice, I wrote a book called The Definitive Guide to Winning with Digital Marketing for Concierge Medical Practices.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (23:32)
haha

Steven Schwartz (23:56)
It’s over 100 pages, tons of great actionable information in there. It’s an easy read. I do geek out a little bit, but I try to tone that back. But it’s available from our website, conciergemd.marketing. Simply go there, scroll down the page where the book is, put in your email address and hit the submit button. Our system will send you a link where you can download the book, read it with my compliments. Of course, if you have any questions, anything’s not clear or you need some help or you want an extra set of eyeballs,

on your digital marketing, your Google Ads, your SEO, your Google Business Profile, or whatever it might be, please reach out to us. I have a link to schedule on my calendar, is cmmkg.com / schedule. Nice and easy. So Dr. Nina Crowley, thank you so much for taking the time to share SECA and the amazing machine with us today and to tell your story and how it can benefit concierge and DPC doctors.

Nina Crowley, PhD, RD (24:52)
Thanks so much, Steven. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Steven Schwartz (24:54)
Awesome. This has been Steve Schwartz with the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. We will catch you on the next episode. Thanks, everybody.