We applaud you for working for what you believe in. What an exciting time to be entering private practice healthcare! We have built our entire business around helping physicians, therapists, and staff thrive in your own practice as entrepreneurs.
Our focus dates to our origin in the mid-1990s as a medical billing software built by practitioners to fix the inherent challenges of medical billing and help doctors collect maximum revenue. In recognition of physician independence, we created our brand around the scrappy, yet highly agile hummingbird.
Setting up a new practice can be a lot of work, but if you have a checklist filled with the most essential details, it can be fast and easy. We recommend working with a legal consultant, certified public accountant, or trusted physician colleague who has started medical practices before to learn the ins and outs as well as pitfalls and best-practices. For example, you should be aware of key risk areas and understand topics such as HIPAA privacy, medical malpractice insurance, and workers’ compensation. Details of your startup can vary by specialty, and some laws and regulations differ by state. A trusted professional consultant typically understands the variables and can help you plan accordingly.
Medical practices require several components to work together simultaneously for everything to flow efficiently. You will need to plan every detail from location to overhead costs like equipment, staffing, medical software. Staff credentials are critical as you want licensed nurses and doctors to provide the best patient care.
Setting up a brand-new practice takes effort and strategic planning. For a private practice to succeed, you need to have a laid-out plan from inception to integration. By following these four guidance areas, you will be on your way to establishing your private healthcare practice in no time.
Planning is an essential part of the healthcare startup process considering locations, financial planning, healthcare payment systems, billing processes, and so on. Practice management software can handle all your needs. Nevertheless, ask yourself the following questions when starting a new medical practice:
These are the foundational questions that you must answer as precisely as possible. It can be a little overwhelming to think of all these questions simultaneously. Take a step back and try again–one by one.
Before processing, you must establish the essential credentials, documents, and licenses to move forward. Required information for credentialling is dependent on payers and typically is consistent from specialty to specialty.
There is a lot to consider if you want to start a new medical practice. For primary care and most other medical practices, the primary instruments you need can range from the following:
In terms of staffing, you need an office manager who can cover human resources, a billing manager who can cover coding, and related administrative staff. Your clinical team includes qualified nurses and medical assistants.
Advertising agency executive David Ogilvy said, “All too often we arrive like plumbers, leaving our tools behind.” Don’t arrive at this phase without front office and medical billing software.
Luckily, these business systems are typically included in most leading medical office software bundles. Good medical office software can help your staff work seamlessly together in a collaborative environment.
Selecting great clinical software, including a working health records system (EHR), is critical. Consider your short and long-term growth plans. Clinical documentation software should be flexible enough to scale with your growth and robust enough to integrate with the ever-increasing health information exchanges (HIEs).
You also need a patient portal and telemedicine for your new medical practice that are simple for patients and staff. Don’t overlook that the key value proposition of self-service tools is to help patients and you save time. Moreover, you should seek innovative technologies so you can connect with patients and charts anywhere on any device. (Think about 2am prescription refill requests.)
Because most start-up practices are cash poor, you need an affordable software system that doesn’t require high dependency on IT staff or expensive capital expenditures.
Look for systems that can scale with enough flexibility to grow in a way that is not only affordable but manageable by leveraging your existing staff.
Cloud platforms were designed to scale and offer all-in-one bundles including practice management, EHR, patient engagement, data storage, automatic backup, and security. Rates are typically all-inclusive within a monthly subscription. Technologies that are hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform tend to create a more automated and unified experience for every role of your new medical practice, thanks to features like: