Becoming a doctor or therapist is a dream that many people share but can be difficult to achieve. The road to becoming a medical professional is long and fraught with exams and essays, not to mention, you might end up owing a fortune in student loans. However, once you get your degree, you’re ready to start your practice and take on, or heal, the world.
Running your own practice is differs greatly from working at a hospital or as a professional in someone else’s practice. You’re liable for everything, from the quality of care to the financial aspects of running your practice. Continue reading to learn what you need to build your own medical practice.
Facilities
When you decide to open your own practice, your first order of business is to find a location from which to operate. The best place to put your practice is in a hospital, medical plaza, or a plaza with other professional services.
Finding the space for your private practice could take some time, but you need to be ready to renovate whatever space you move into. It’s a good idea to be on the lookout for general contractors to handle your remodeling needs while you’re searching for the ideal space for your private practice. CMK Construction has been renovating homes and kitchens for homeowners in Tampa Bay for nearly 17 years, and they’ll be able to help you get your office for your private practice up and running.
Tail Insurance
Before opening your private practice, you need to protect yourself against malpractice claims. Malpractice claims are the Achilles’ heel of medical practices and have ended many of them. The best way to ensure you’re always protected from false claims of a wrongful act is with tail insurance.
Tail insurance is a type of insurance policy that protects doctors for claims made long after the alleged wrongful act occurs. Tail coverage protects you when there’s a gap between your new policy and your old policy. If you’re in the process of changing your malpractice insurance coverage and someone files a claim against you, your new policy will pick up at the retroactive date of your old policy. This is known as tail coverage, prior acts coverage, or nose coverage, and it protects you from prior acts that occurred before your new policy takes over.
Accounting
When running your own practice of medicine, it can be easy to get so caught up in providing medical care that you forget about the financial aspects of running a private practice. Furthermore, being a great doctor doesn’t mean you’re great at balancing a budget and managing payroll and other overhead costs.
As a medical professional, you know how important it is to leave the expert work to the experts. Outsourcing your accounting needs to an accounting firm allows you to focus on doing a great job where it counts—in your examination rooms. So, you do the doctoring, and let the accountants do the accounting.
Front Office Personnel
The most important thing to know about running a private practice is that you can’t do it alone. Front office personnel are an integral part of any private practice. They’re the first people your patients see when they enter your office.
When looking for the right administrative assistants to help you schedule appointments, communicate with patients, and keep records, it’s important to look for experience. Being that your practice is new, you can’t afford to take the risk of hiring people who don’t know what they’re doing. To find the best candidates to help make your private practice a success, you should use online recruiting tools like Indeed and Glassdoor.
You may even want to consider going the extra mile and contract a recruiting service to do some headhunting for you. They scour employment databases looking for the ideal candidates whose profiles match your qualification requirements.
As you can see, running a private practice means knowing how and who to trust. You can’t do it alone, but with the right tools and people, you can build a practice that you can be proud of.