Starting A Practice
You’ve finally decided to start your own practice. Whether you are starting alone, or with other medical or dental professionals you trust, getting it right is essential. At the practice start-up stage, the smallest of oversights can have a substantial impact on your practice’s success. Partnering up with PracMD means that you will get access to our experience across multiple areas of business and can draw upon this to ensure that you get it all right.
PracMD believes in providing scalable services tailored to your business stage, at fair and reasonable price. Money is always tight when starting a business, so investing in the right advice is fundamental to your business’s success.
Our business start-up advisory services include advice regarding:
- Site selection for new practices
- Competitor study and analysis
- Marketing and growth strategy
- Business structuring advice
- Registering a new business
- Leasing new premises
- Designing and fitting-out your practice
- Implementing new practice policies and procedures
- Implementing HR and payroll systems to hire staff
- Advertising, interviewing, and hiring new staff
- Implementing practice software and information technology systems
- Implementing Medicare and bulk billing systems
- Implementing receivables management and debt collection processes
Speciality Specific Advice
Your specific speciality and the operating model you choose will largely dictate the practice specific considerations that need to be taken into account when starting your practice. PracMD can provide specific advice tailored to your needs thanks to our in-depth understanding of the healthcare industry.
Example considerations for specific specialities and business models include:
General practitioners need to decide whether they wish to operate alone, with other GPs as business partners, and/or whether they wish to recruit other GPs as contractors or employees. Critical decisions regarding whether to bulk-bill, the percentage of bulk billing, and price setting relative to the patient demographic served by the practice can also be fraught with difficulty. These decisions are not always set in stone, and dynamic decision making is often needed for the best results.
Early business decisions fundamentally change the practice model, each requiring specific advice suited to the practice’s current position. The advice needed is rarely one-off and often requires a dynamic approach, adapting and changing as the practice grows and matures.
Furthermore, GPs that undertake more procedural work will face increased expenditure on treatment rooms and specialised equipment. This will typically need increased focus on marketing the special interests or procedural work to ensure that the practice grows into what you envision it to be.
Physician practice is largely driven by the nature of the specific speciality, along with the physician’s personal preferences. Physicians that only require simple rooms for consults, with any procedures at hospitals or day-surgery centres, e.g. VMOs, have a fundamentally different business model and consequently need different business advice than physicians who are staff specialists in the hospital system looking to supplement their work with independent private consulting.
Further still, physicians that work completely outside the hospital system essentially run a standalone practice like general practitioners and need to consider an even broader range of operational issues. It is possible for physicians to be employees, independent contractors, employers, and business owners simultaneously in different contexts.
PracMD has staff that understand the Australian health system and the issues associated with each work context, and can provide expert advice tailored to your needs as a specialist physician.
Most specialist surgeons running a private practice are VMOs with admitting rights to at least one hospital. This combination of private practice and hospital remuneration means that there are two aspects of the business that must be managed. Often, surgeons will rent rooms at several medical centres or they may own their own private rooms. Decisions regarding the optimal practice structure, whether to rent rooms in another practice, rent your own office space, or purchase your own office space can have significant financial consequences for your business.
At PracMD, we can help you make the right choices for your business, help you manage accounts, taxes, and operational matters so that you focus on surgery in the operating theatre.
Finally, PracMD’s extended operating hours means that you can transact all your business without the stress of using up valuable surgery or clinic time during the day.
In addition to the general practice considerations and planning necessary when starting a healthcare business, dental practices have unique requirements that business advisors without a health background simply won’t know about. Here’s where PracMD comes in.
For example, dental practices are capital intensive as they require significant medical furnishing (e.g. dental chairs, cabinetry, sterilisation areas), special room layout/services (e.g. delivery systems, lighting, x-ray shielding), and tools of trade (handpieces, sterilisation equipment, etc) that general medical practices to do not necessarily require. PracMD can help with making decisions regarding what to buy and when to buy it. We work with you to budget for these costs in a business conscious manner, while keeping your long-term business plans in mind. There are several key decisions to be made in the initial opening and growth of the practice, and overinvesting too early on or overleveraging is a common issue that new practitioners often need guidance to avoid.
PracMD has specific knowledge of dozens of these potential issues and can help guide you through making the right decisions for your business.
Secrets to a Successful Practice
At PracMD, we believe that there are a few simple but essential ingredients to a successful healthcare practice, they are:
- Choosing the right time in your career to set up a practice
- Choosing the right people to practice with or to employ
- Setting up your practice correctly
- Running your practice efficiently and to best-practice standards
- Delivering quality service that keeps patients happy
- Monitoring the practice for changes and responding appropriately
- Maintaining a work-life balance for you and your staff
- An element of luck
At PracMD we can help you with implementing all the above, the earlier we're involved, the better. As for luck, we believe that people make their own luck, by ensuring they take care of everything else the best they can!
