STAT Wellness: Revolutionizing Healthcare Through Functional Medicine and Wellness
Written by Melissa Schenkman, MPH, MSJ
STAT Wellness, Atlanta
Kristin Oja, DNP, FNP-C, IFMCP, is the founder of STAT Wellness (Strength to Achieve Total Wellness), a revolutionary healthcare practice that bridges traditional medicine with functional medicine and movement. With five locations and 45 employees, Dr. Oja has created a model that focuses on root cause medicine, patient empowerment, and community building. In this conversation, she shares her journey from emergency room nurse to wellness entrepreneur and offers insights for millennials seeking optimal health.
What initially drew you to pursue a career in healthcare?
Dr. Oja: It's funny, it kind of found me. I wasn't that young girl who wanted to go into the medical space. I was actually going to be a fashion designer at one point—I made my own clothes in high school and literally sewed myself into them! I found personal training first after being an athlete my whole life and suddenly realizing in college that I had to intentionally exercise. I loved being that cheerleader for people, empowering them and seeing them get stronger.
My parents encouraged me to get a degree, and mentors told me to go into nursing because I could always fall back on it. But my first rotation was in a dialysis unit—filtering blood for four hours in a dark room with no windows and fluorescent lights. I was this cheerleader wanting to help people feel better, and they were just curled up under blankets. I realized this was sick care, not healthcare.
How did that experience shape your approach to medicine?
Dr. Oja: Even in the ER, where I loved the adrenaline and got 13,000 steps in a shift, I kept seeing people come in with a brown bag of 15 medications. They didn't know who prescribed what, why they were on it, or the interactions between them. I kept thinking there has to be a better way.
When I became a family nurse practitioner, I found myself with five minutes per patient, trying to find the right medication to match the symptom. That didn't make me happy—I still wanted to empower my patients like I did as a personal trainer. So I went back for my doctorate and did functional medicine training because my mind keeps going back to "why." If your hair is falling out, if you're bloated, if you're depressed—why? It's not a medication deficiency.
Q: How do you explain the connection between health and wellness to patients who see them as separate concepts?
Dr. Oja: Health is not just the absence of disease—that's what we're taught, but it's not accurate. We can actually be very ill and not diagnosed with a process. To me, health and wellness is about optimization. It's feeling your best, understanding we're all unique individuals, and not normalizing symptoms.
It's very common in the US to normalize our symptoms. You're tired and your hair's falling out, and people say, "Well, you have two young kids at home." But you don't have to be tired with your hair falling out just because you have two young kids. In the wellness industry, it's all about optimization. In the health industry, it's "Do you have a disease state? Do you need medication?" I think it's about bridging these together to realize both health and wellness are about being the best version of yourself.
Why do you think millennials are more open to this integrated approach?
Dr. Oja: I feel like we were taught to challenge and be curious. The older generation takes everything at face value—if you're the expert, they'll believe you. But we grew up in the Google era where we learned to verify what we're told. If we're told to take a medication, we want to know the side effects. We want to understand and be curious.
These external tools have allowed us as millennials to ask questions and bring health and wellness together. We're becoming much more knowledgeable about our bodies, we know the right questions to ask, and if we don't, we know how to find out.
What motivated you to leave traditional healthcare and start your own practice?
Dr. Oja: Multiple layers drove this decision. First, I have a core value of wanting to have impact. When I looked at what I was doing for patients—writing prescriptions and fixing problems—it didn't align with that value. I believe to have impact, you have to know the person and build a relationship. Our new patient visits are an hour, and we talk about everything from your mom's pregnancy to your upbringing, exercise history, and menstrual cycle. Looking back, I don't know how I knew what to prescribe someone in five minutes.
Second, I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. I'm constantly looking at places I've worked and thinking about what should be done differently. What kept coming back in science as one of the most important things for longevity is community and happiness. That became the foundation of STAT Wellness—building community where I can see you work out, get coffee after class, and have access to unlimited health coaching.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced starting STAT Wellness?
Dr. Oja: First, I want everyone to know that entrepreneurship is a beautiful ride, but it is a ride. It's up and down constantly. I worked from 3 AM to 11 PM every single day when we first opened. I couldn't pay myself for two and a half years—not even a single dollar. My first salary was $36,000.
The first major challenge was funding. I went to every bank, and every single one told me no. There was no proof of concept for blending functional medicine and movement. I showed them functional medicine practices and movement practices separately, but they said nobody was doing both. I was like, "Nobody—that's why I'm doing it!"
I still signed the lease—almost $8,000 a month with no revenue coming in and no business model. My husband asked where my business plan was, and I pointed to my heart. I told him I might die trying, but I would do anything to make it work. Fast forward six years, we have 45 employees and five locations.
What advice do you have for health entrepreneurs about running a business?
Dr. Oja: If you're a health entrepreneur, don't run your business based on a profit and loss statement like other industries. It won't work in healthcare. You need to run it based on patient experience because they're your marketing—they're the ones coming back and referring others.
From the beginning, we focused on how to improve the experience for every patient walking through our doors. We've made so many decisions that cost us money and had minimal profit margins, but we kept our patients in mind. That's what has driven our success.
Can you tell us about the variety of services you offer?
Dr. Oja: We've stayed focused on two main areas: functional medicine and movement. All our services fall under one of these categories. Functional medicine is root cause medicine—taking a deeper dive into your health and understanding the "why." That includes health coaching, dietitians, nurses providing IVs and injections.
On the movement side, it's about human performance. We believe movement is medicine and muscle is our greatest asset as we age. This includes group fitness, personal training, small group training, VO2 Max testing (a great indicator of cardiovascular health), resting metabolic rate, and body composition analysis.
We're really big on our patients not focusing on the number on the scale—we don't care about that. We're big into data. STAT Wellness stands for Strength to Achieve Total Wellness, but there's also a spin on "know your stats." People come to understand what's happening inside their body through functional medicine and externally through movement assessments.
Kristin Oja, DNP, FNP-C, IFMCP, is the founder of STAT Wellness, a personalized medicine practice that offers a wide variety of services to help patients achieve total wellness. In her practice, she focuses on finding the root cause of chronic illness and disease.
She has more than a decade of experience caring for patients.
Dr. Oja earned her Masters in Family Practice Nursing and her Doctor of Nursing Practice at Georgia College and State University. She also holds a certification in Functional Medicine from The Institute of Functional Medicine.
Dr. Oja is also the host of the Little By Podcast and a keynote speaker on health, wellness, and functional medicine.
What makes your collaborative approach unique?
Dr. Oja: We like to say we're a one-stop wellness shop where everyone gets to talk with each other. I can speak with the health coach about how my patient is doing, consult with the dietitian, and they can call me about improvements, side effects, or concerns. We're a collaborative, multidisciplinary team, which is so missing in mainstream medicine.
What has surprised you most about working with patients in this integrated model?
Dr. Oja: Two main things stand out. First, the connection between mental health and physical health is undeniable. With about 8,500 patients, I see this over and over again. There's so much unhappiness and discontentment in the United States—people focused on not being the size they want, hair not being as thick as they want, constantly comparing themselves to others on social media. This directly impacts their physical health in ways we can see in lab results and hear in consultations.
Second, the individualized approach has shown me how truly different we all are. I have patients who feel incredible on a carnivore-style diet, others who thrive on Whole30, and some who do amazing on vegan diets. Science likes to tell us there's one best approach, but our gut microbiomes, genetics, and body composition are all different. The 12 patients I see today are each chemically very different, and what works for one won't work for all of them.
What trends in wellness are you most excited about?
Dr. Oja: I'm really excited about people taking ownership of their own health. The availability of continuous glucose monitors like Stelo over the counter is fantastic. I think everyone should know what's happening with their blood sugar throughout the day because when you balance blood sugar, you're decreasing inflammation and improving performance, food cravings, brain health, longevity, healing, and sleep.
I'm also excited about wearables, though with a caveat about not becoming too fixated. We tend to take things too far in the US—like eating only from 1 to 4 PM because intermittent fasting is popular. But if used properly, wearables are fantastic for connecting the dots. Patients realize things like "I had a glass of alcohol and my deep sleep wasn't as good" or "I needed an extra recovery day after running six miles."
Surprisingly, I've also come to appreciate AI and ChatGPT. Patients are putting their lab results into these tools and coming to appointments with questions and knowledge. I love it because they're already engaged and curious about their health.
What's your key advice for aspiring health and wellness entrepreneurs?
Dr. Oja: No matter what field in healthcare you're in, listen to your patients. Listen, listen, and actually care—and caring is listening. People ask us all the time what scaled STAT, and it's that we focus on the patient in front of us and we listen. It sounds so small, but it's everything.
Also remember our favorite quote: "Little by little becomes a lot." On your entrepreneurial journey, just take one step, then another. You're not going to figure it all out at once—you'll keep figuring it out. There's always a new problem, always something new, but as long as you keep working toward the same goals, it's going to work itself out.
What's the most important thing you want people to understand about wellness?
Dr. Oja: It's not one size fits all—I can't stress that enough. Take time to pay attention to your body. Remove the wearables and data for a moment and actually notice: How do you feel when you wake up? Are you energized? Do you have good mental clarity? Are you craving foods, and if so, when and why?
We don't take enough time to have awareness around how our bodies are feeling and functioning. My patients are the only ones who can tell me that—there's no blood test I can do for it. There's nothing I can observe besides you telling me how you're actually feeling on a day-to-day basis.
Want to hear more from Dr. Oja? Listen to the YMyHealth podcast!