Physicians in Private Practice Need to be Entrepreneurs

It is more important than ever for private practice physicians to sharpen their entrepreneurial edge, and I mean that in a good way. With the various healthcare reform options being discussed, I hear a recurrent theme that in order to bring healthcare costs down, and the quality of patient care up, we physicians are going to have to be smarter, more efficient and results driven. In other words, think like an entrepreneur running your practice. I use “entrepreneur” in its positive sense: innovative, creative, nimble, frugal, and so on. For some, the word entrepreneurial is negative, as in greedy or always distracted by the financial aspects of work, but I disagree with that negative interpretation.

In the past, perhaps, starting and managing a medical practice was pretty standard stuff. Get your medical degree, hang out your shingle, and you stayed in business as long as you took good care of your patients. But there’s no doubt the classic private practice paradigm of the last 50 years will disappear and new practice models will evolve. It’s fair to say, I think, that no two practices will be completely alike and instead there will be many versions. Some of the “reformers” might argue that all medical and healthcare practices should operate like McDonald’s and in some practice settings maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad approach.

To counter that opinion and state the obvious, patients are individuals, and require tailored specific care, unlike a hamburger that gets cooked exactly 90 seconds on each size. The tailored-care approach makes much more sense to me. Personalized care will be the new paradigm, in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, stem cell solutions to diseases and in every direction healthcare is improving and evolving today. Private practices can deliver personalized tailored care better than any other practice model. Practices should partner with the government or big institutions, perhaps, to benefit from their resources of scale, but the private practice will be the best vehicle to deliver the personalized care of the (near) future to our large and diverse population. Physicians as entrepreneurs will make that care happen.

Dr. David Marcinko, over at the HealthcareFinancials.com website wrote an interesting article recently entitled “The Power of ‘Me, Inc’ for Physicians” that reflects my thoughts exactly. Give it a read. His website and service has much to offer physicians running their own business, their own private medical practices.