The Winning Formula: Transition from Recommendations to Protocols
After twenty-five years of supporting healthcare clinics worldwide in the integration of nutritional services, one truth has become undeniably clear: the most profitable and clinically impactful practices do not rely on spontaneous recommendations — they operate with structured, protocol-driven systems.
The difference is stark. While many clinics offer a wide range of nutritional products and services, those without defined protocols often suffer from clinical inconsistency, team confusion, and poor profitability. In contrast, successful practices standardize their approach using well-researched protocols, creating reliable outcomes and predictable revenue.
Let’s lean on the words of James Clear from the best-selling book Atomic Habits:
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
This quote resonates deeply within the functional medicine community. It perfectly illustrates the performance gap between clinics that rely on ad hoc recommendations and those that operate with protocol-based systems.
When a clinician makes a recommendation, they’re tapping into four vital — and often depleted — personal resources:
Energy: Recommendations require energetic delivery. Patients feel your energy before they hear your words.
Cognition: You must mentally process the patient's case, current protocols, labs, and progress before recommending a next step.
Creativity: You often need to tailor recommendations to the patient's lifestyle, financial situation, and existing treatments.
Conviction: Without genuine belief in your recommendation, conversion and compliance suffer.
These four factors must be activated every time a recommendation is made. This process can be exhausting and unsustainable at scale.
Protocols change the game.
When you build a protocol, you front-load the energy, cognition, and creativity once — during the design phase. From that point forward, you free up your team to deliver consistent, high-conviction care. Your confidence in the protocol naturally elevates your conviction. Why? Because protocols are evidence-based, iteratively refined, and built for consistent outcomes.
Protocol-driven systems create:
Relief Packs: We launched Relief Packs to reduce inflammation in the chiropractic market. It streamlined new patient nutritional recommendations, cut down inventory management and reduced staff interaction while driving revenue, compliance, and improved patient outcomes.
Ease Effect Program: In the medical weight loss industry we created an Ease Effect Program to reduce the side effects of those patients who are utilizing GLP-1 agonists. The synergistic nutrient program has been added to all programs where patients are taking GLP-1 agonist medications. This has streamlined patient flow, reduced side effects from the medications, increased compliance and created a 4x increase in revenue from nutritional sales.
At Aceva, we’ve helped implement clinical nutrition protocols in chiropractic, medical weight loss, functional medicine, and longevity centers — as well as through automated online assessments. The results? Protocol-driven services regularly produce 2x–6x revenue increases within the first 90 days of implementation.
If you're ready to move beyond inconsistent recommendations and build a system that drives outcomes, efficiency, and profitability — the protocol model is your winning formula.
Schedule a consultation with our Clinical and Business Development Team to see how you can convert recommendations into protocols to help you gain an edge in the marketplace while providing better outcomes for your patients.
By Dr. Joseph Esposito, CEO of Aceva
Your patients deserve better outcomes. Your team deserves clarity. You deserve a system that works.
Let’s build it—together.