Health Care Practice Difficulties: it is the Economic Climate, Or Is It?

Close to 40% of health care within the U.S. is provided by doctors (MDs, Dentists, Podiatrists, etc.) privately practice. an outsized percentage of those practices are struggling. the explanations behind this are as variable because the people you would possibly speak with. it is the economy, unemployment, insurance companies, the housing bust or banks tightening their lending standards, creating a situation where people can't afford health care anymore, etc.

Having owned a successful private practice , let me make one point: if a doctor is blaming their lack of business success on any of the explanations above (or anything similar), they're in trouble.

Here's a brief version of my story for instance my point: In 1992 I had a practice during a farm town in Indiana of ten thousand with eleven dentists. The grocery which anchored the mercantile establishment i used to be in moved. then , all the opposite businesses left or went bankrupt with the exception of the general public laundromat. i could not leave because I had eight years left on my lease. and every one this within the middle of the recession that Clinton inherited when he took office. It killed the economy in northern Indiana and other people were afraid to spend money (sound familiar?). i used to be having a tough time cashing my paycheck and was considering staff lay-offs for the primary time in my (at that point) eleven-year career. Whatever I did, regardless of what solutions i used to be trying to find , I had no answer .

The stark reality was that, albeit i used to be well trained as a dentist, I had no clue the way to run a practice or business-certainly not the way to pull my practice out of the the tailspin it had been in. they do not teach you those things in school of dentistry . One day, I heard about MGE: Management Experts, a management training company for doctors and other professionals privately practice. I walked in with all of the standard "reasons" why my practice was doing poorly-the economy, my location, etc. This stopped once I learned a lesson early from MGE: There are belongings you can control and belongings you cannot. Do something about what you'll control and do not worry about the remainder .

So I need to work and learned the way to build a business. Through this training, I learned the way to do marketing to usher in patients who really cared about their oral health. I learned the way to get them to travel ahead with the dentistry they needed-in spite of the economy. and that i learned the way to run an efficient practice that rapidly expanded and made profit. Twelve months after starting my training at MGE, my practice had doubled, I'd brought on an associate and that i was working twenty-two hours per week while the office was managed by my trained office manager. and she or he had never worked during a dental office before.

Life was great, but I could see that a lot of of my colleagues were browsing what I had skilled before training; unfortunately, not all of their stories ended happily like mine. it had been frustrating and that i wanted to assist . i made a decision to try to to something about it and within ten months I sold my practice to my associate and came on board at MGE as a partner.

I have learned the hard way that it isn't the situation of the practice, the insurance industry or the recession that results in failure in these unbelievably tough economic conditions. I even have found through experience that it is the lack of know-how in running a business that gets most health care practitioners in trouble.

I know a dentist within the Detroit metro area with two partners who have done an equivalent practice management training I did at MGE. they need since opened three new locations within the past four years-during an equivalent period of time the recession hit Detroit. Their business viewpoint is that while other offices are closing, somebody possesses to require care of those patients so it'd also be them. They recently got five hundred seventy new patients in one month! believe it, they're in Detroit which has (according to the news media) been hit harder economically than simply about any area of the U.S.

I know another dentist in San Diego who did an equivalent training and opened a practice in June, 2008, even as the recession was starting. He refused to participate in any PPO/HMO plans. His advisors said he was committing financial suicide which he would be joining the plans during a matter of months. At the top of his first twelve months, he was successful financially and getting over sixty new patients per month. He's working three-and-a-half days per week, has an associate three days per week and 6 days of hygiene. And he's doing all that out of only three chairs and he has just added a fourth-to keep his expansion going. only for the record there are about 170,000 dentists within the US and about 20,000 of them are in Southern California.

The dentists mentioned above aren't out-of-the-ordinary, they're just hard-working, caring, quality people-with a couple of exceptions: 1) they were willing to exit and admit that they needed help, 2) they were willing to think for themselves and not stock to the negativity spread about by the masses, 3) they were willing to think outside the box and never agreed that it had been hopeless, and 4) they were willing to take a position time and money in their most precious business asset...themselves!

So yes, the economy plays a serious part in our lives, especially for little businesses and personal practices. Overall, it isn't a reasonably picture in the least . But my viewpoint is: Doctors privately practice got to learn to manage their office in order that they can overcome those problems and really give people the standard care they deserve-insured or not, no matter economic conditions.

Gregory A. Winteregg, D.D.S.

Dr. Gregory A. Winteregg received his degree from the Indiana School of Dentistry and administered a prosperous practice before he became a partner of MGE in 1994. Learn more about what he does at MGE Management Experts by visiting http://www.mgeonline.com.