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Exploring Life & Business with Angela Mineo of Cheval Wellness
Today we’d like to introduce you to Angela Mineo.
Hi Angela, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I’m Angela Mineo, an autonomous adult-gerontology primary care nurse practitioner with over 15 years of experience in the healthcare industry. For the first half of my career, I worked as an ICU nurse, including time at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. For the last 7 years, I have been working as a nurse practitioner in a busy primary care office.
With this experience, I have become very knowledgeable in managing very complicated conditions, but it left me wishing I had more time to make personal connections with those I was treating. At my previous office, the length of our appointments was limited to fit more people into a day due to declining insurance reimbursement which wouldn’t give me the time required to really understand my patients & the cause of their problems.
Women would frequently come to me with certain complaints like abnormal fatigue, brain fog, stubborn weight, and mood changes and I would feel helpless as conventional medicine and insurance companies wouldn’t offer or cover adequate solutions. So at the beginning of this year, I decided to open up my own clinic, Cheval Wellness in Trinity, to be able to care for my clients in a better way.
Our foundation is direct primary care, which is an all-inclusive monthly membership care model instead of dealing with insurance copays or deductibles. This model allows us to keep our panel small so that we have more time to focus on our clients, ensure unrushed 60-minute appointments (if needed), and guarantee the availability of same-day or next-day sick visit appointments. I am passionate about helping people feel their best and are very excited to grow our company and mission.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has been a lot of hard work as I have been running it on my own but I have had great support from family and friends along the way. We were also selected for Spectrum’s “Pay It Forward” program for small minority-owned businesses, which gave us the opportunity to run our very own TV commercial in the West Pasco and North Pinellas areas.
The main roadblock we have now is the delay in getting our second location in Lutz built out. We had originally planned for the Lutz location to be our only location, but with the delays in construction, I decided to rent a space in Trinity so that I could start helping people now. We are eagerly awaiting permits so that construction can get going.
As you know, we’re big fans of Cheval Wellness. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
In addition to our direct primary care membership we offer a few other programs, one of which is bioidentical hormone replacement therapy for women, the real solution I had been looking for previously for my female clients. Physical deterioration and the menopausal symptoms they reported to me are not a requirement for growing older.
It is possible to stop much of these undesirable aspect of aging as well as the symptoms and diseases associated with aging. Hormone replacement therapy is an updated science that has been shown to not only prolong life but improve the quality of one’s life. We also have a fully customizable, medical weight loss program which can include semaglutide or tirzepatide.
Our clients have had great success in their weight loss journey with our program, whether they just wanted to lose the “last 10 pounds” or to get healthy for life. We include nutritional counseling and monthly visits with our provider, along with daily motivational emails.
At Cheval Wellness I pride myself on allowing enough time with each client to be able to get to know them and not making them feel rushed. We value mutual respect, compassion, and nonjudgemental care. We also provide direct communication with your provider at any time with a variety of options including text, email, or messaging through our secure portal.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
It was definitely a big risk to quit my full-time job to focus on building Cheval Wellness, but I’ve known since my undergraduate days that I wanted to own my own clinic at some point.
The years I spent as an employee were incredibly helpful as I learned from some of the best doctors in the area, but I felt like I would never realize my full worth if I continued working as an employee for someone else. It wouldn’t have been possible without the support of my husband and family, for which I will be forever grateful.
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