Personalized care for extraordinary lives

Atypical Care is a private, specialty healthcare agency in Richmond, Va., founded by Lisa Brownlee Johnson, a nurse practitioner who was born and raised in Richmond, where she continues live with her husband and their sons.

After nearly 20 years as a nurse, including almost a decade as a primary care provider, Lisa finally came to the realization that the most impactful way she could help improve a person's health is to start with the person. The way to really accomplish better health is to focus on the unique needs, circumstances, and gifts, of each individual person you serve, rather taking a cookie-cutter, disease-based, corporate-dominated approach that takes humanity out of the healing process.

Out of this realization came the Atypical Care mission: To provide personalized care for extraordinary lives. This mission reflects lived experience, including working as a primary care provider throughout the COVID Pandemic in a clinic that remained open the entire time. For Lisa, there was something lifechanging about continuing to serve in person during COVID, while so many other institutions were closed. It was the kind of lifechanging experience that helps a person clarify priorities and appreciate the fragile nature of human life.

And while practicing the science and compassion of caring for patients with chronic conditions, Lisa also came to learn the priceless value of self-care and the true reward of purposefully serving others.

This learning came as a result of working with not only patients living with conditions like dementia, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and mental illness, but also from being a vital part of her own, multigenerational family. Family has kept her on her toes, constantly reminding her of the importance of balance in the human journey, being there for one another, and maintaining physical and mental health.

Instead of being discouraged or defeated by life challenges that spare no one, Lisa decided to follow a path of humility and transformation, using all the lessons she had learned, to pursue a calling through Atypical Care.

Lisa, who once worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, graduated with honors, earning separate bachelor's degrees in mass communications and nursing from Virginia Commonwealth University in the 1990s and early 2000s. She later went on to earn her master's of science in adult primary care nursing from VCU, where she graduated with a 4.0 grade-point average in 2014.

While continuing her love for primary care, Lisa set out in late 2023 on a path of entrepreneurship, navigating a course to establish a way to provide services that seemed to be falling through the cracks in traditional healthcare. Services that take more time and attention than our current healthcare model is able to provide, even with the best of intentions among the powers that be. Services that a private agency like Atypical Care, working directly for patients instead of working for the insurance bureaucracy 'middleman,' would be uniquely equipped to provide.

Thus, Atypical Care was established: A small, nimble, locally owned, highly skilled, and devoted agency, with services including functional medicine, science-based fitness programs, dementia screening, insomnia therapy, complex medical case management, and more.

Each service is personalized and specifically geared toward making a clear and sustainable contribution to preservation of function and quality of life, for all involved. Everyone deserves the best shot at the best possible health. That is the Atypical Care way.

Lisa Brownlee Johnson NP is licensed as a registered nurse in Virginia through the Virginia Board of Nursing. She also is licensed as a nurse practitioner in the state of Virginia, where she holds prescriptive authority and autonomous practice designation through the Joint Boards of Nursing and Medicine under the Virginia Department of Health Professions. Her certifications include adult-gerontological primary care through the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP); RN Case Management, through the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC); Certified Geriatric Care Professional, through Evergreen Certifications; and Mental Health First Aid, through the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. She also is a member of the Institute for Functional Medicine.