Building your own medical practice is not like other entrepreneurial pursuits. You cannot just have the idea, raise the capital, hire some licensed medical professionals, and start the company. It is much better to understand that starting a medical practice is one of the last stages at the end of a medical career. Or, perhaps, it would be better to think of it as the culmination of all your medical training.
Education never stops when you work in healthcare jobs. Health Jobs, a healthcare recruitment service offering, among other things, physician assistant jobs, recommend that a particular old chestnut remains very good advice – everything you learned in med school will be wrong in about ten years.
Of course, that is not strictly true, but it is the right way to think about things. There are a lot of practical considerations to starting your own practice, but more important than all of this is that you need to be at the peak of your game as a medical professional – and fully abreast of the latest medical procedures, technology, and research – before you start your own practice. You are providing healthcare, and you need to toe the same line as every other hospital or clinic in the country.
The Challenges
Another important consideration are the considerable challenges you are bound to face when setting up a private practice. As things stand in the U.S. at the present time, we are suffering a death of medical professionals, not medical institutions. It is an incredibly competitive talent market, with medical practices all fighting over the top recruits.
However, this is where you can bring in a bit of business sense. Business is all about competition, so the best way to sail through the stormy water of the current jobseeker’s market is to build a truly attractive place to work. This takes business sense, but also all the medical expertise you have built up over all the years you have been working for somebody else.
Tips for Starting Your Own Medical Practice
Here follows some further tips for making your private practice a success:
Network
The reason why starting your own medical practice is something you only do later in your career is partly because you need to build up the expertise, but also that you are going to need the connections. These connections are built up incrementally and, even if you feel like starting your practice is a goal many years in the future, you should be doing it from the start. What junior doctors, for example, would you like to work for you when you set it up? Get to know them early on in your career.
Manage Your Time
What does this mean in the context of a private practice? What it means is accurately working out what you can provide, how many patients you can serve, and what you can offer. This takes business sense. A great starting point is to start creating templates for different patient scenarios. You will soon get a good idea of how much work you can take (and the staff you’ll need for it).
Build a Marketing Strategy
No doubt, you’ve spent all your career doing medicine – not business – but you really do need to think along these lines if you’re going to see any success. There are some important principles: be visible to your patients, have a clear brand, and specialize in something. This will let you know what you need to show to the world, and your marketing strategy will become clear.
It’s no walk in the park but, if you pull it off, starting your own practice could just be the crowning glory of your whole career.