Medicine & Business

Here are two ideas for generating additional revenue for your practice when working with contract issues and health plans. One concerns the relevancy of your fee schedule and its applicability when contracting with a health plan. The second concerns adherence to clinical guidelines as an unconventional contracting strategy.

In addition to the clinical challenges, the first year of practice is most likely the physician's initial exposure to the "business" of medicine. This article provides insights for smoothly navigating the transition from resident or fellow to successful first-year primary care practitioner.

It is time to throw away some of those past management habits and move into the future. Here’s how to begin.

The focus on providing more comprehensive medical services or restructuring the delivery of care is a dramatic and positive improvement over previous generations of business ventures.

The use of electronic medical records has been slowly growing but is not expanding as quickly as many expected. There are several potential reasons for this.

Essential components of an effective billing system that can operate on a shoestring budget include equipment needs, personnel training, relationship development and use of computers.

By beginning to focus on corporate, financial and operational planning now, your practice will hopefully sail into 2001 with little fuss.

Any physician faced with an opportunity to participate in a nonqualified plan should have a basic understanding of the tension between the taxation of nonqualified benefits and the security of such benefits.

One option might entail a semi-retired doctor electing to work a certain percentage of a full workload (e.g., day schedule, weekend call, night call, etc.). Another option might entail the semi-retiring doctor dropping procedures (e.g., dropping OB, no longer doing surgical cases, etc.), while maintaining an office-only practice.

The question to address is whether or not the current resources dedicated to marketing are used wisely and whether they are sufficient for you to grow and sustain the practice.