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Health care-related business celebrates 10 years

KAREN VIBERT-KENNEDY/Sun-Gazette The procedure room at New Beginnings Health Care for Women.

Rana Colaianni is convinced she’s in the right place as a business owner in a health-care related service unique to this area.

The nurse practitioner this year is celebrating her 10th year as owner of New Beginnings Health Care for Women.

“This was divinely inspired, and then it took its own shape,” she said as she stood inside her business site at 1017 Washington Blvd. in Williamsport.

A decade ago, she was looking for a change, even if she didn’t know she’d become a business owner. She had long worked in health care but wanted to take a slightly different direction than she’d traveled.

“I simply quit my job,” she said. “I just felt I was called in another direction. I shifted from family medicine to integrative medicine.”

Colaianni offers health care that combines traditional and alternative medicine. The setting for New Beginnings is comfortable, even homey, to provide for a relaxing setting for patients.

“We try to create a complete healing environment,” she said. “This is where I spend my days, so it heals me too.”

There are exam rooms, but also a meditation area.

Patients, she said, who come for a variety of health-related problems, receive a compassionate and personal approach. Many have sought medical care elsewhere and still haven’t found the relief or balance in their life they are seeking.

“We spend most of our time talking,” she said. “I might recommend the person get in touch with their spirituality,” she said.

It’s a holistic approach to health care, embracing all modalities, that too often is missing from traditional health care, she noted.

Colaianni said New Beginnings has evolved to meet a real need in the region.

“People were really looking for a different approach, someone to listen to them,” she said.

While most of her patients are women, she also sees men. She estimated that about 40 percent of her patients are from out of the local area and many of them come through referrals from health care professionals.

Over the years, she found the logistics of running the business as posing the biggest challenge.

For a time, she accepted health insurance, but found it created more headaches for her than anything.

“It really got in the way of doing the type of care I wanted to do,” she said.

She said the strictly cash business has not discouraged patient flow either.

Her other challenges as a business owner include dealing with the usual unpredictable ebbs and flows of running a business, from dealing with the upkeep of her building to cash flow.

Over the years, she’s diversified and the business has evolved.

“Staying current is always an issue,” she said. “I offer more services now.”

Men are more likely to schedule appointments with her now, to add yet another dimension to her offerings.

Overall, she thinks launching New Beginnings a decade ago was the right move.

“I love coming to work,” she said.

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