After years of caring for 1,000 patients in the traditional healthcare system, Dr. Lindsey Beauboeuf experienced physician burnout firsthand. Once she had time to heal, she built the practice she wished existed: MOZAÏK Lifestyle Medicine.
MOZAÏK is a boutique Direct Primary Care practice with a lifestyle medicine lens, focused on real-relationship-type services.
“I loved working with patients [at my previous job], but because it was a fee-for-service and traditional conventional care, there was not a lot of wiggle room for me to provide the relationship-based, thorough, personalized care that I wanted to offer my patients,” she said.
The goal at her earlier job, she said, was to see as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time to generate revenue, which burned her out. While handling as many patients as possible, she was stretched thin between her family home burning down in Haiti, and then her best friend was diagnosed with cancer, who is now cancer-free.
Photo by Isaiah Singleton/The Atlanta Voice
Once she quit her job, Beauboeuf said she would never practice medicine ever again because she didn’t sign up for profit over people.
“During that time, I felt like it was a big sacrifice because I really love being a doctor,” she said. “I began to question why God would make me go through medical school and all the hazing for me to just stay home and not practice what I love to do.”
So, Beauboeuf decided to embark on a spiritual journey, praying and fasting. No food, just water for three days, and when it was finished, she felt called to open her own practice.
“I did not want to do it because that was never in my plans, and opening a practice means a new business,” she said. “If you know about opening a business, it’s a lot. Entrepreneurship is not for the birds, but if God tells you they got you, you say yes, and you trust.”
On March 24, Beauboeuf celebrated the official ribbon-cutting of MOZAÏK in Smyrna.
“Reflecting on the ribbon cutting, I felt this deep gratitude mixed with deep joy,” she said. “It’s like receiving a gift you know you want, but don’t think that it will really happen for you. I’m still in awe seeing my kids cut that ribbon and my baby saying, ‘I want to come to MOZAÏK and make people feel better’”.
Additionally, Beauboeuf says her office may be in Smyrna, but her community is everybody in Georgia who can come to the clinic. The work she is doing at MOZAÏK is important because, as a doctor herself, there was a feeling of checking her identity at the door, Beauboeuf said.
“I couldn’t be my full Haitian self nor my full Christian self. I couldn’t be my whole black self. When I walked into the exam room, there would be this silent expectation that you needed to conform and adapt and be a certain way,” she said. “I wanted to show you can get great care without having to live a double life. I just want to make sure people know they are welcomed as they are and they will always be cared for without judgment and with love.”
Also, in five years, Beauboeuf says she sees MOZAÏK as a flagship of what it can be nationally and even globally, gearing towards real relationship-based, true primary care.
“I want this to be something that other physicians and other doctors look at and realize this might be a new standard for primary care,” she said. “This might be the way you know care should be given, where primary care is self-care. I want people to look forward to going to their primary care doctor’s appointment and engaging with the health care system and not feel like they are going to be treated like a number.”
With MOZAÏK being her first business venture, Beauboeuf says she’s still figuring out entrepreneurship herself. For advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, she says, even if you’re building a business that already exists, it’s about the way you build it.
“Build it as it has never been done before. My biggest advice is to not feel discouraged when things don’t go the way that you imagine they would go,” she said. I want people to take a risk and take a chance on themselves, and if you fall, it’s not failure. If God put that dream in your heart, it is okay to fail forward; success is a point of view. You will reach that success.”
MOZAÏK Lifestyle Medicine is located at 3650 Highlands Parkway SE, Smyrna.
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