Supplements are one of the most requested and least standardized parts of primary care. Patients arrive with bags of bottles from the big-box store. They ask which turmeric to buy. They start a plan, lose track of it, and never refill. For the clinician on the other side of that conversation, the clinical work is only half the job — the rest is logistics, quality vetting, and follow-up that rarely fits inside a visit.
We recently sat down with two people who have solved for that in very different settings. Emmie Dickerson is the owner of Key 2 Wellness Direct Primary Care in Panama City, Florida, a practice she opened in 2023 that also specializes in functional medicine and bio-identical hormone replacement therapy. Laura Zacharia is an integrative pharmacist, nutritionist, and professor who spent most of her career in retail and clinical pharmacy before moving into integrative practice, and who now teaches clinicians how to apply nutrition and nutraceuticals in their own settings.
What follows is a recap of that conversation, along with the workflow Emmie has built over nearly three years of recommending supplements through Fullscript.
Emmie started where most conversations about supplements should start: credibility.
"Third-party testing is almost non-negotiable," she said. "I need to know that it's a quality supplement, and my patients need to know that as well."
She sees the alternative every week. Patients come in with stacks of shelf-brand supplements that may technically contain the right nutrient but miss on the details that determine whether it works — bioavailability, formulation, and the specific form a given patient can actually absorb. Magnesium glycinate and magnesium oxide are not interchangeable. Patients with MTHFR variants need different formulations than the ones sitting on the shelf.
Laura broke quality into layers: whether the ingredient matches the label, the dose matches what the literature says is effective, the format is bioavailable, and the product was transported and stored in conditions that preserve it. Her example — fish oil riding in a truck through 110-degree Arizona heat — makes the point that quality is not just a manufacturing question. It follows the product to the patient's doorstep.
Her broader argument: the clinical evidence for supplements exists. The hard part is curating it. Chasing down third-party data across hundreds of brands, matching doses to clinical efficacy, and screening for interactions is real work, and it competes directly with the time a clinician has to be present with a patient.
That is exactly where Emmie draws the line between what she owns and what she delegates.
"Fullscript actually helps with that decision process, the vetting process, because I'm the vetter," she said. "And if my patients trust me, there's a certain trust factor. With Fullscript, I don't have to worry about whether the supplement is quality or not."
The second theme was one Laura called genius, and it is the most portable idea in the whole conversation: build the protocol once, then use it over and over.
"I'm a firm believer that you don't need 500 products to make your formulary tight," Emmie said. Roughly 80% of patients, in her experience, are covered by 15 to 25 evidence-based products. Most clinicians would likely find the same is true of their own prescribing habits.
So she built protocols in advance for the categories she sees most: PCOS, high cholesterol, metabolic health, thyroid support, inflammation, and prenatal care. When a patient with PCOS is in front of her, the protocol already exists.
"I'm not interested in reinventing the wheel over and over again," she said.
Laura framed it as an extension of something prescribers already do. You have a preferred pharmacological intervention for a category. You have a starting dose. You run an interaction check, make adjustments for the individual, and send it. The nutraceutical side works the same way once the baseline exists — and the baseline is what removes friction from the recommendation.
It also prevents a specific failure mode. Tell a patient to "go get a turmeric," and they will stand in an aisle looking at a hundred options, then message you through the portal asking which one. Or they will pick one with an added ingredient they shouldn't be taking, which turns a convenience problem into a safety problem.
Personalization still matters, and both physicians were emphatic about it. Laura screens for adherence directly, asking patients to rate on a scale of one to 10 how consistently they think they'd take a supplement. If the answer is low, the plan changes — a powder instead of a capsule, a liquid instead of a large softgel, fewer items instead of more.
Emmie put it more bluntly: "The best supplement is the one that the patient will actually use."
For clinicians who feel uneasy about the commercial side of supplements, Emmie's reframe was the sharpest moment in the conversation.
Nobody blinks when a physician writes a prescription for hypertension or diabetes. Supplements, she argues, belong in the same category. "Supplements and nutraceuticals are prescriptions," she said. "It no longer becomes I'm selling you something. It becomes I'm treating you."
The revenue follows the education rather than the pitch. When a patient understands why a supplement is part of the treatment plan, and then receives a recommendation that reinforces what was just explained in the room, cost stops being the objection.
That circle closes at the point of delivery. Emmie sets expectations during onboarding — new patients are told the first few weeks will be high-touch and high-tech, and that a welcome message from Fullscript is coming alongside everything else. Then she leans on one specific detail.
"The lovely thing about Fullscript is they also send a text message. The conversion rate with text messages is significantly higher, because everyone always has their phone in their hand," she said. When the platform asks whether to send by text and email, her answer is always yes.
Laura added a practical option for practices worried about affordability or about feeling salesy: clinicians can adjust patient pricing at their discretion, including a first-time discount to lower the barrier on an initial order. It is a way to meet patients where they are financially, and a way for clinicians new to a retail dynamic to feel more comfortable making the recommendation at all.
Emmie was candid about what she got wrong early:
Picking products on margin instead of merit. In the lean early days she reached for an expensive line and justified it on quality. "That's not the answer," she said. "We have to meet patients where they are." Keeping things lean for the patient is the core of direct primary care.
Ignoring drug-supplement interactions. Blood thinners and turmeric were her example, and her rule was memorable: supplements are drugs. Something being on the vitamin aisle does not make it harmless.
Recommending too many things at once. Start with one to three targeted supplements aimed at what is making the patient most uncomfortable. Anything more overwhelms patients financially and psychologically, and it makes it impossible to tell what's actually working.
No follow-up. Recheck the vitamin D level. Showing a patient that a plan worked builds more trust than the recommendation itself did.
Laura's addition was to make supplement goals SMART, the same way we do with lifestyle recommendations. Vitamin D at a specific dose, retested at three or six months. Omega-3 and turmeric with pain as the tracked outcome. Insulin sensitivity is monitored with a fasting glucose, A1C, or CGM. A tangible result is what sustains adherence to the supplement and to everything else you recommend.
The reason any of this is sustainable in a busy practice is that the recommendation happens inside the visit rather than after it. A quick note in the chart, a template sent through Fullscript, and the job is done. Fulfillment, reminders, refills, and patient communication move to the platform. There is no inventory to count, no expired stock to pull, and no orders to chase.
For Emmie, the integration is what makes that possible.
"The ability to just seamlessly recommend things, particularly supplements, inside the Hint environment — I can't say enough," she said. "The integration by itself creates a much more streamlined workflow, and I can honestly say the time I take to choose supplements has been reduced by at least 50%. It's already there, it's ready to go, the patient has it in their hand, and we can continue with our treatment."
Fullscript is available through Hint Marketplace, which connects the tools practices already use directly to their Hint workflows. If you already use both, the integration takes minutes to enable and puts supplement recommendations in the same place you're already documenting the visit. If you're a Hint customer who hasn't started dispensing yet, this is a low-lift place to begin.
Watch the full conversation or connect Fullscript in Hint Marketplace to get started.