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Treating your practice: The business side of medicine

When physicians finish their training, they know how to take care of patients -- but learning to take care of their business is a whole new challenge. From asking your neighbor to pursuing an MBA, there are numerous ways to build up your management acumen.

By Julie A. Jacob, amednews staff. Feb. 18, 2002.

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When doctors start their own practices, they quickly learn that there's a lot that medical school did not teach them.

Like negotiating leases. Or supervising staff. Or dealing with cranky landlords. Or reviewing managed care contracts.

Andrew Cheng, MD, an ophthalmologist who has had a solo practice in New York City for 13 years, said he wasn't taught about dealing with people pitching their services to him.

When he first started his practice, Dr. Cheng said, he was scammed by a credible-sounding man who offered to do some public relations work for him for $1,000 -- and then cashed the check and disappeared. That experience, he said, taught him to ask a lot of questions and check references before hiring anyone to do work for him.

Although many people decide to become physicians because they want to help other people instead of climbing the corporate ladder, physicians who choose to open their own practices soon discover that they are both physicians and small-business owners.

For their practice to succeed, they have to care for their business as carefully and diligently as they care for their patients. Yet caring for one's business is something that physicians often find themselves unprepared for when they start their careers.

Noted Dr. Cheng, "Even though most young doctors know that they will step out into the real world with all the business things, I don't think we actually deal with it, face to face, until the moment."

For example, Gregory Hood, MD, an internist in a small private practice in Lexington, Ky., said the hardest part of being in practice for him is keeping up with the policies and paperwork for all the different health plans that his practice has contracts with. [...]