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You Miss 100 of the Shots You Don T Take

Big Shot

In the mid 1990s, Americans studying abroad began widening their horizons--instead of spending a semester in Florence or Paris, they were heading off to Bharat, Thailand, Republic of bolivia and beyond.

Fran Lessans, a nurse at a college wellness clinic in Baltimore, noticed that although students got the required travel inoculations, they were otherwise unprepared. "The wellness information they were getting was poor at best, so I started developing educational materials," Lessans says. "Give-and-take spread--I didn't even do whatsoever marketing--and people started coming out of the woodwork, wanting me to take care of them."

That's when she got the idea to set out on her ain. She partnered with a md, and they bought a stockpile of vaccines and set up a small-scale, part-time clinic offering individualized travel-health advice and injections. A couple of years later, Lessans was working as a nurse at Maryland General Infirmary--and getting a abiding stream of requests for subsequently-hours travel consultations.

"The CEO of the hospital asked me, 'What exercise we have to do to proceed you lot and your business hither?'" Lessans recalls. "And I told him, 'Purchase a franchise.'"

He did. And now 15 years later, Passport Health has 170 clinics around the country, dispensing travel vaccines, flu shots and other therapeutic injectables such as human being growth hormone and osteoporosis shots.

Passport Health fifty-fifty trains authorities agencies in dispensing anthrax and smallpox vaccines. We talked to Lessans about condign a medical entrepreneur and the changing world of travel health.

A travel-medicine dispensary: now that is a niche.

The globe is a smaller place than it was. Swine flu, anthrax, avian flu, SARS and other issues have brought vaccines to the forefront. Businesses are expanding into India and China and the developing earth, and in that location are more than people traveling, more scourges, more than media attention. It'southward terrible to say, simply when at that place are disasters, we exercise better. And I've found that a lot of people come in because they know someone who got sick abroad--if they accept a cousin who went to Hellenic republic and got hepatitis, they'll make an appointment.

Who are your franchisees?

We take doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, people who were downsized looking for a franchise, people with medical folks in their family unit. A lot of our franchisees are well educated and looking for more than stimulation than what an automotive or fast-food franchise can provide. In that location is a body of knowledge here that is ever changing and you demand to stay abreast of it. You take to have a medical director involved.

We're meticulous nigh information collection and conduct studies. This is more than of a professional person franchise versus a blue-collar franchise, which is proficient news and bad news: I tin can't sell to all comers, but my franchisees don't demand their hand held as much.

How about the off-season?

Travel medicine can be wearisome in the autumn, but nosotros specialize in vaccines of all kinds. We've been involved in several bioterrorism initiatives with the Section of Defense, training them on using the anthrax vaccine. In the fall, nosotros do a lot of corporate flu and wellness contracts and have done vaccinations for T. Rowe Price, Delta Airlines and Constellation Energy. Plus we run a 24/7 telephone call center that answers travel wellness questions from military personnel and Section of Defense employees.

Why go to Passport Health instead of a physician?

You can phone call and tell us where yous're going, and then do the forms online. There's no down time--you're never sitting in an exam room waiting. Information technology's the Nordstrom approach to medicine--your time is valuable. [In Baltimore, for $48,] nosotros give you a bound volume of pertinent information and show a video about what to expect, what to consume and non eat. We teach you how to properly use bug repellent. This is our core business concern, and at that place'southward a lot of value considering we're not stretched thin doing anything else.