Reasons You Should Consider Opening a Private Practice

After finishing medical school, residencies and fellowships, physicians must decide how and where they would like to practice. Although this decision may be limited depending on your specialty, many fields of medicine offer a wide variety of options when it comes to your working environment. Accepting a position at a well-established hospital or clinic often provides a lot of job-stability, but starting a private practice opens up numerous new opportunities. Consider just a handful of the reasons you may want to consider starting your own business as a practitioner.

1. Room for Growth

As entrepreneurs such as Brendan Wetzel will tell you, it takes money to make money. Starting a business requires a lot of initial capital and presents some degree of financial risk. Additionally, you may not be able to count on a steady income at first. Despite these challenges, owning a private practice gives you almost unlimited room to grow in your career. In contrast to a salaried position with another organization, your business’s profits could significantly increase over time. With business structures such as a limited liability company or partnership, you can reduce your liability and your tax responsibility.

2. Customized Scheduling

Another big perk of opening a private practice is that you are your own boss. While this could mean increased on-call hours, this may also result in a lot more flexibility for many specialties. Namely, you can set your own business hours and choose how much time you wish to allot for seeing patients or performing certain procedures. If you opt to go into business with a partner, you may even have more flexibility. You and your partner(s) can share on-call time and cover for one another if you must leave town. 

3. Hand-Selected Staff

In every line of work, most employees must learn to get along and cooperate with other staff members who may not care about their job or do it well. If you own your own practice, you can choose whom you work with. This allows you to make sure each and every person your patients interact with performs the job to the best of his or her ability. This will likely improve the atmosphere of your office, as well as prevent patients from leaving unsatisfied or even improperly treated.

4. More Control Over Patient Care

A final reason you may want to consider starting your own business as a physician is that you can be sure patients are treated the way you want them to be. Many hospitals and clinics are so large that patients feel (and often are) forgotten. Similarly, these bigger operations are often so profit-minded that they rush physicians through their patient visits, causing patients to leave with unaddressed questions or concerns. In your private practice, you can change these things. You can ensure that each patient has adequate time to be treated and that their financial matters are dealt with patiently. 

Most doctors enter the field of medicine not only because it interests them, but also because they want to help people in some manner or other. At the same time, physicians must earn a reasonable living. Owning a private practice enables you to do both of these things as you see fit, not as someone else tells you.

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