Local entrepreneur and mental health professional Dr. Jennifer Prager is a pioneer in her field, launching an innovative new business model for mental health professionals in the area. Last August, Prager and her husband, Henry Chiu, opened the Counseling Clinics of La Jolla (CCLJ), a consortium that lets mental health practitioners focus on doing what they do best — treating their clients — without the hassle of performing administrative functions or the expense of owning and maintaining their own office space. The consortium provides services and amenities that are specially catered to meet the needs of all mental health professionals — from clinical psychologists, marriage and family therapists, clinical social workers, expressive therapists and psychiatrists — to minimize their valuable time spent on paperwork, advertising, billing and scheduling. “We take care of all the administrative needs. We provide our members with the support they need for scheduling, billing and records storage. We even provide onsite childcare for patients,” Prager said. “We want the therapists to be able to focus on the treatment they are providing.” The facility itself contains 10 fully appointed therapy rooms for individual and group or family therapy, a fully equipped expressive therapies room, Wi-Fi access and telephoning rooms for phone calls and transcription, and an extensive resource library complete with testing equipment, books and professional journals — all of which is included in the monthly fee. Prager said she first envisioned the cutting-edge “one-stop-shop” concept 12 years ago in graduate school. After having a child — which entailed having more time to think — she was determined to resurrect the idea and bring the concept to fruition. After presenting her husband with her idea, Chiu began crunching numbers and making phone calls to come up with a viable business model. “I looked at the profile of the typical psychologist, and I saw how their careers evolved,” Chiu said. “Many of them work in institutions or group practice and want to have their own private practice, but the startup costs are too high for them.” The consortium provides the ideal solution for mental health professionals who are seeking to scale back their practice or for those looking to make the transition into a private practice. “If you’re trying to start a mental health practice in La Jolla, you have to rent an office, pay for utilities, get a secretary, have testing equipment. You’re looking at a very large initial investment,” Chiu said. “In our facility, you pay a membership fee, and you have all that handed to you. The entire genesis of our business plan is to enable people to do better.” Most other businesses that try to offer a similar model are group plans in which practitioners are required to share liability and pay back into the group, he said. “They really don’t have independence over themselves,” he said. “One of the things we wanted to do was enable practitioners to be independent because we believe being independent lets them be better practitioners.” Chiu, a physicist and nuclear engineer, said he learned the power of synergy in the workplace from his work in national laboratories and other large, collaborative projects. With a wide range of mental health professionals under one roof, an inner-referral service is one of the key components of membership with the consortium. “Because we offer them a place where they have colleagues, they’re not shut in as a single practitioner in a quiet office somewhere without interaction,” he said. “If you bring a lot of people together to share resources, you can get a lot of things done.” In order to accommodate the therapy resources and amenities required for a successful consortium, the building had to be remodeled from three separate buildings to one single, coherent facility. “We had a great contractor and an architect on board who understood us,” said Prager. The task was certainly a daunting one, as the building itself was both spatially and temporally separate. “It was three different buildings that were built at three different times, and they just wrapped it all up,” she said. “This was one of those architectural nightmares. Our architect is even using this building as his dissertation because it’s been one of the strangest buildings he’s ever had to deal with.” Despite the challenging undertaking, construction on the building was complete in less than six months. “The design and current layout was no easy task, but it is beautiful and perfect for our purposes,” she said. “Therapists will find everything they need under one roof.” Counseling Clinics of La Jolla is located at 1150 Silverado St. For more information or for inquiries about rates, visit www.counselingclinics.com or call (858) 922-9388.