How To Run a Medical Practice: Key Strategies and Tips

According to the American Medical Association, the number of doctors with private practices has decreased dramatically. Over 60% of doctors worked for private medical practices a decade ago, but today, around 45% work for private medical practices.

Do you have a medical license from an accredited medical school and an interest in starting your own private medical practice? Outside of securing funding to cover startup costs and developing a solid business plan, learning how to run a medical practice should be your first order of business.

Getting your own medical practice off the ground won’t be easy, but having your own practice will be rewarding if you’re successful. Let’s run through key strategies and medical practice tips you can put to good use.

Understanding the Basics of Running a Private Medical Practice

When thinking about how to run a medical practice, your mind may automatically jump to all the exceptional patient care you’ll provide. But before considering this, make sure you understand there is more that will go into creating a business plan for a thriving medical practice.

Here are the responsibilities you’ll face when running your own medical practice:

• Finding the right office space for your practice
• Securing financing for the furniture, medical equipment, office supplies, etc., you’ll need for private physician practice operations
• Obtaining funding through traditional bank loans and sending a loan request to other types of lenders
• Hiring a staff, including doctors, nurses, and an office manager, and setting up a scheduling system for employees
• Familiarizing each staff member with the latest healthcare rules and regulations
• Figuring out which health insurance companies you’ll work with and going through the credentialing process
• Coming up with a practice management system that enables you to keep accurate medical records
• Creating a website and other marketing materials to put your practice on the map
• Searching for ways to deliver a positive patient experience while reducing errors made by medical assistants, nurses, doctors, and other healthcare professionals
• Establishing a human resources department and outsourcing tasks like medical transcription
• Choosing accounting software that can handle billing needs, reveal anticipated revenues, and highlight potential tax benefits

When considering how to run a medical practice, don’t focus solely on providing top-notch medical care at your practice and lose sight of the fact that you’re running a business that needs to turn consistent profits. At the same time, you don’t want to get too caught up in how much money you’re making when you have a medical practice starting and overlook the need for great patient care.

Key Metrics for Managing Your Own Medical Practice

As soon as you start a medical practice and turn it into a legal entity, you’ll need to begin monitoring certain metrics that showcase the well-being of your medical clinic. At least some private medical practices that many physicians have sold in recent years have hit the market because they simply weren’t generating enough cash flow. Keeping tabs on the right key metrics can help you avoid this fate.

Identifying and Analyzing Metrics

Here are the metrics your private practice must keep an eye on:

• How many patients visit your own practice?
• How long are your patients’ appointments?
• How many satisfied patients does your practice have?
• How many clinical errors does your staff make, and how does this affect your medical malpractice insurance?
• How long will it take patients to pay you, and how soon will health insurance companies cover your claims?

The better you are about tracking your own medical practice and its performance, the easier it’ll be to make improvements.

Strategic Investment in Technology for Medical Practices

If you aren’t ready to embrace technology, your medical practice could be doomed from the start. It’s impossible to provide above-average care and achieve patient satisfaction in 2024 if you don’t wrap your arms around technology.

Role of Technology

Finding ways to use technology to your advantage won’t be difficult. You can, for example, utilize automated appointment reminders to let patients know when they have scheduled visits coming up.

Appointment reminders can ensure patients don’t miss appointments and cut into your bottom line. Other benefits of embracing technology within your medical practice include:

• Keeping your patients’ records organized and making them easily accessible
• Preventing your staff from wasting time tracking down patients and their records
• Making a great impression on those who notice your commitment to patient satisfaction

The impact of software on the healthcare industry cannot be overstated. It’ll allow you to do everything from setting up an electronic health record (EHR) system to virtually seeing patients who can’t make it into your office space.

Data-Driven Decision Making

We live in a data-driven world, and this applies to the healthcare system. As the business owner of a private medical practice, make it your mission to take advantage of healthcare analytics and its valuable insights.

Leveraging Analytics

This particular aspect of the healthcare industry is constantly changing and making it difficult for practices to keep up. But since you’re just learning the ropes of how to run a medical practice, you will want to stay on top of the latest ways to analyze patient-related data and apply it to get the best outcomes.

Some examples of data-driven technology you should consider using include:

• Real-time location services that can track patients, staff members, medical equipment, and more
• Business intelligence tools that can analyze population health data
• Artificial intelligence products and services that can spot potential health problems

Communication and Decision-Making Processes

Simple miscommunications can take a toll on you, your employees, and, most importantly, your patients if you don’t plan carefully. Dedicate time to developing a well-thought-out communication plan for your medical practice to prevent mishaps from affecting your level of care.

Developing a Communication Plan

Not sure how to create a communication plan that will work for your practice? Here are the steps you can take:

1. Identify the key decision-makers that exist within your practice.
2. Establish clear-cut communication protocols that allow your employees to take information from your patients and pass it on to those decision-makers.
3. Figure out how you’ll document these communications as they take place.

These case studies reveal how you can simplify your practice’s communications.

Planning for Unexpected Scenarios

All business owners should master the art of expecting the unexpected. This is especially important for medical practice owners since unforeseen scenarios can and will happen within a medical setting.

Scenario Planning

Some unexpected scenarios that might occur within your practice include:

• Staff changes
• Supply shortages
• Financial disruptions

Sudden office closures could also impact your practice’s operations if you have multiple offices. You can get around them by taking the following steps:

• Generate a list of unexpected scenarios your practice might face.
• Create contingency plans for each separate scenario.
• Communicate your contingency plans to employees and patients, if necessary.
• Consider the possible legal ramifications of unexpected scenarios.

You can also strategically position someone like an office manager to take the lead on handling these scenarios.

Medical Reporting and Documentation Standards

Medical reporting might be one of the least exciting aspects of starting a medical practice. But it’s also one of the most important since failing to meet documentation standards could put your practice in a tough spot.

High Standards in Documentation

Conducting accurate medical reporting and adhering to lofty documentation standards is essential since not doing these things could lead to unnecessary errors by a private practice doctor and make it challenging to provide top-tier medical care and afford malpractice insurance. If you aren’t documenting every patient visit, it could hurt your ability to provide adequate treatment.

The key elements of achieving high standards in medical documentation are:

• Legibility
• Reliability
• Precision
• Completion
• Consistency
• Clarity
• Timeliness

The good news is that technology has made medical documentation much easier. Still, you shouldn’t let it lull you into a false sense of security since one wrong keystroke can negatively impact your patients’ records.

Continuous Evaluation and Improvement

You should set your medical practice up for success from day one, but you shouldn’t stop trying to turn it into the best practice it can be once it opens. Instead, focus on evaluating your practice as it grows and find steps you can take to make it even better.

Building Resilience Through Evaluation

Saying you want to improve your practice and actually doing it are two different things. If you aren’t sure where to start to make improvements, here are several tips that should help:

• Monitor the local news to see what people and the media say about your practice.
• Take feedback from patients and apply it to your day-to-day operations.
• Pinpoint inefficiencies within your practice and work on improving them.
• Read through financial reports to find ways to increase profitability.

Cybersecurity Measures

A recent Security Magazine report revealed nearly 90% of the data healthcare providers store these days is done digitally. This illustrates the importance of protecting your data by implementing cybersecurity measures.

Prioritizing Cybersecurity

If your practice ever leaves your patients’ records susceptible to cyberattacks, it could harm your reputation. Avoid this by:

• Using cloud-based storage systems for data
• Running security programs to thwart hackers
• Employing multi-factor authentication

Teach your employees about the dangers of cyberattacks, too, and provide actionable advice about not opening emails and downloading files that could contain viruses and malware through ongoing training.

Deciding on Practice Structure

Not all healthcare practices are created equal in the medical field. Decide how you want to structure your practice to deliver the best care while generating profits.

Options for Practice Models

You can choose from one of the following options for practice models:

• Independent practice: Allows you to maintain more control over your solo practice or group practice but also forces you to cover initial startup costs and handle marketing, accounting, etc.
• Health system affiliation: Puts you in a position to capitalize on the name of a nearby healthcare system and provides hospital privileges but comes at a steeper cost
• Private equity group: Prevents you from making a significant financial investment to cover startup costs to start a solo or group practice but makes you accountable to a board

Marketing and Patient Acquisition

“If you build it, they will come” works in the movies, but it doesn’t always work in the medical world. If you don’t have a plan for marketing your practice to your target market, acquiring patients could be a struggle.

Effective Marketing Strategies

Fortunately, there are many marketing strategies you can use to help your practice stand out from other healthcare providers. Digital marketing is the best option since it’ll include strategies like:

• Establishing a website and incorporating search engine optimization (SEO)
• Creating a social media presence
• Running online advertisements and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns

You can also try local marketing by doing community outreach, establishing a referral network, sending out direct mail or email marketing campaigns, and finding other ways to connect directly with potential patients.

Operational Efficiency

The more efficient you can make your business operations when starting a medical practice, the better patients will respond. It won’t be long before they use your referral network to refer family members and friends.

Implementing Efficient Processes

How can you implement efficient processes into your normal workflow while running a healthcare practice? You can begin by investing in an electronic health record system. An EHR system will make your practice more organized.

You can also create Standard Operating Procedures, or SOPs, to help collect and store data. Obtaining the right practice management software can work wonders for completing administrative tasks like creating an effective billing protocol for credit card processing. It can also help you earn more positive patient testimonials.

Need Helping Running Your Medical Practice? Weave Can Help

It isn’t easy even when you know how to run a medical practice. All healthcare providers can tell you that about starting a medical practice.

Weave can assist you in overcoming challenges. We have services your medical practice needs to enjoy long-term success. Explore Weave’s solutions and get a demo to optimize your medical practice management.