Project Elivate: Episode 1
Hey, Welcome To Project Elivate!
Where we will discuss all things related to health, aesthetics, longevity, and optimal aging.
The topics discussed are the opinions and clinical experiences of Olivia Stivers, NP and are not intended to treat or diagnose any medical conditions. They are meant to empower and educate our audience. If you have any specific concerns, please contact your healthcare provider.
We’re excited you’re here!
I’m Olivia Stivers, a nurse practitioner, a wife, and a mom to 3 kids. My husband, Chad, and I have been married for 14 years. Our kids are Gentry, 12, Corbin , 11, and Truitt is 9. All three of my kids are very active in sports. A lot of the reason I do what I do, is for them so you will hear me talk about them quite a bit.
As far as my professional background, I have been a nurse since 2010, 2011. I worked at Baptist for 10 years, and from there I decided (after having my kids, of course) that instead of carrying out tasks for someone else, I wanted more autonomy. The acute care setting can also be exhausting due to the illness and disease that you’re surrounded by. After a while, that can take a toll on you mentally. I knew there had to be more out there. The world isn’t just full of sick people, there are also people who are well and want to maintain that.
I started looking into becoming a Nurse Practitioner. I thought this would help me be able to provide more education, and get ahead of things. I wanted to practice Primary Care, which in my mind was focused on prevention. So when my son was 5 weeks old, I got the wild hair to apply for Nurse Practitioner school.
I laugh looking back because I called my mom and said “Hey, I need you to with me to this open house at Spaulding University” (which is where I did my undergraduate and graduate studies.) I just needed her to watch my son while he was in his carrier. But my mom is a nurse - she graduated later in life, actually a year before me, so we’ve kinda grown up together in a sense. My mom had me when she was young and couldn’t go to college. So we went to this open house, she’s watching Truitt, and the administrators at this open house realized she was a nurse too and conned her into going back to school with me. Long story short, my mom and I ended up graduating Nurse Practitioner school together. It’s been really cool to have my mom as a backup and support system in this.
What led me to Elivate Wellness? I have always been interested in health and wellness even as a young child. When my mom married my stepdad, I was around 10 and I gained 2 brothers. One of them was really active, playing baseball and weight lifting. Even though he wasn’t big at the time, his goal was to put on a lot of muscle and I was able to witness his transformation. He encouraged me to learn more about strength training and nutrition. I have been strength training and learning about nutrition from a very young age. I didn’t realize how that was going to influence my career and professional development as I aged. I thought it was just a hobby of mine, something I enjoy doing. Little did I know, it would lead me down the path of Nursing and then ultimately becoming a Nurse Practitioner.
Fast forward, to after graduation Nurse Practitioner school, I began working in Primary Care. Unfortunately, I found myself doing the same things. I was seeing the same sick people over and over again and I was treating disease, not really preventing it. Occasionally, I would see a patient for preventative care but usually, I felt like I was back in the rat race, chasing my tail, “here’s your ill, here’s your pill” type of thing. I wasn’t really getting to any of the root issues of what was causing problems for our patients.
The first 2 years of my clinical experience as a Nurse Practitioner, I was fortunate enough to work alongside other Nurse Practitioner Entrepreneurs who had opened their own Primary Care office. Katie McCoy and Kelly White were the Nurse Practitioners who influenced me more than they probably realize. They were able to chase their dream and opened a Primary Care office in their small town of Brandonburg (sp?) and impact the community there. Although, I loved working with them, I was presented with a job opportunity to leave private sector and go to a bigger corporation so I worked at ….. Community Center, which was a great experience. I got to serve an underserved population. However, I got a taste of how it was working for a bigger administration versus private practice. I have to say, that was something that just didn’t sit right with me.
Not only, was I being dictated by insurance companies telling me what I could and couldn’t do for my patients, I also had an administration that was not medically inclined which made it even more of a struggle for me. I realized that maybe I’ve always had this spirit of entrepreneurship within me and that translated into thinking about how I could help my community, how could I be a leader.
So I started thinking. I didn’t really want to do Primary Care, I knew I didn’t want insurance companies to dictate treatment options, I wanted to educate and empower my patients. I began looking into direct patient care or concierge care.
Elivate Wellness is a direct patient care or concierge care practice. Which means we do not use insurance at all for what we do. That’s because insurance companies can serve as the “middle man” between patient and provider. Think of it as “monkey in the middle.” The provider throws a ball to the patient but the insurance company intercepts that ball and takes it away. Whether that’s a certain therapy we would like to employ, medications, lab tests, imaging orders - a lot of those things are dictated by insurance coverage. I did not want that to be a barrier to care for our patients and I wanted to mitigate that as much as possible.
Direct patient care practice is what we do. Our focus is on prevention so we are able to employ therapies that are not as common in Western, or conventional model. We do a lot of hormone replacement therapy, nutrition counseling, peptides - we use a lot of peptides, inbody scans where we’re checking body composition analyses. This helps us determine where the patient is when they come to see us. Do they have complaints or are they trying to maintain where they are? It’s really neat to be able to see someone come in for, say they have fatigue or low libido, wanting to gain muscle mass, no matter what their goals are, we are able to work with each patient individually with no time constraints, no insurance company telling us what we can and can’t do, no one throwing my diagnoses out the window and saying the code isn’t correct for what I was trying to do. You see a transformation occur. We are able to run a lot of specialty tests such as GI mapping, cortisol testing, we also have an entire panel of labs run off of serum and they are very detailed, tests I didn’t have access to in Primary Care and I lacked the time to sit down and go over results with the patient. I am really grateful we have these things available to us and fortunate to be where I am today. I’ve been practicing at Elivate for a year and half now and to see where we started and where we’re at, I don’t even think we’ve scratched the surface yet. Also, to be in my hometown of Bullitt County, situated perfectly between Shepherdsville and Mount Washington, it’s like all the pieces are falling into place perfectly.
Another thing you will hear me talk about is my faith. I can’t say that it’s anything I’ve done, I truly just feel like I am doing what God called me to do. He has opened up very narrow windows of opportunity and I’ve been willing to go through those. It’s been on the hardest things I’ve ever done. One of the hardest and scariest things I’ve done. But it has certainly grown my faith and my relationship with God. I see my business as a ministry and I think the biggest impact I can have in someone’s life, even if their health doesn’t improve, if they can somehow see Jesus when they come into our practice and feel loved, then we have done what we’re called to do.
I’m excited to cover different topics so if you have any topics that you’d like us to cover, please send those to us at olivia@elivatewellness.com. Maressa also has a wonderful testimony as well, so I can’t wait for you guys to hear that. Any patient that sits down with Maressa is going to gain a lot of knowledge.
I think that’s it - thanks for stopping by!
