Today’s Challenges in Private Practice

o survive as a private practicing physician in today’s healthcare environment, it takes astute clinical judgement, effective collaboration with colleagues, innovative problem-solving, and digital technologies to ease the burden and help the practice provide quality medical care.

The number of physicians owning private practices has decreased over time with many being owned by healthcare systems or health-based companies. There remain a committed few who enjoy having the independence of owning their own practice and being able to have some flexibility in developing a deeper relationship with their patients. According to the AMA Policy Research Perspectives report, the number of physicians working in private practice is falling with only 49.1% of doctors either owning or working in a physician-owned practice. Many patients value the close relationship that private practices afford them, therefore positively impacting the quality of care they receive, but physicians face the challenge of balancing the expectation of their patients with the day-to-day operations of effectively running a private practice.

Private physician practices face many challenges in today’s healthcare environment. The AMA highlighted a study—“Supporting and Promoting High-Performing Physician-Owned Private Practices: Voices from the Front Lines” - identifying at least eight threats to that style of medical practice. “One of the things we were trying to learn was—what was really going in the decline of private practice?” said Carol Vargo, the AMA’s director of physician practice sustainability and one of the authors of the study, which was co-published with the Oakland, California-based consulting firm Mathematica. “For many patients, private practice is a lifeline and the erosion of private practices undermines the quality of health care for many.”

For the study, AMA and Mathematica researchers drew from a pool of 3,526 practices with fewer than 15 practitioners that were not owned by health systems and recruited 25 respondent practices, interviewing 25 physicians from these practices. The panel of physicians interviewed identified eight threats to their success:

• Rising administrative burdens.
• Low and falling payment rates.
• Lack of negotiating leverage.
• Recruitment is costly and challenging.
• Hard to get good data to manage patients.

• The cost of IT and the needed support.
• Feeling professionally isolated.
• Bumpy transition for physicians to private practice.

To survive as a private practicing physician in today’s healthcare environment, it takes astute clinical judgement, effective collaboration with colleagues, innovative problem-solving, and digital technologies to ease the burden and help the practice provide quality medical care.

Telemedicine and remote patient monitoring can address some of these challenges. Remote patient monitoring and care coaches allow digital technology to monitor patients outside the office setting, sending data to a licensed nurse and the provider improving the management of patients with chronic conditions, preventing emergency situations and last-minute appointment requests with limited availability, easing some administrative burdens, and increasing revenue for the practice.

For more information on remote patient monitoring, please visit rpmhealthcare.com.

Resource: AMA offers the resources and support physicians need to both start and sustain success in private practice.