How Do Practitioners Really Feel About Working in Private Practices?

The age old question for healthcare professionals entering the workforce is this: Should I work in an employed position at a hospital, or should I work at a private practice?

Though each path has its own benefits and downsides, employed positions are becoming the more favorable options for many physicians. 

Today we’ll be going over the results of a survey done by Medical Economics and discussing their findings pertaining to how practitioners really feel about working in a private practice.

Growth & Success

When asked how they would define “growth” in their practice, providers had some interesting things to say. Of those asked, the following responses were given as the primary indicator of practice growth: 

• 70.5% - having more patients
• 30.5% - having more staff
• 30.1% - increasing profits

Additionally, of the practitioners who said that growth was determined by patient/staff volumes, only about 31% of them said they are currently operating at their ideal volume.

Of the profit-oriented physicians, only 25% said they feel as though their practice is currently earning what they believe to be enough revenue.

Interestingly, in terms of success, approximately 73% of participants believe their practice has attained an appropriate level of success, while 11% are dissatisfied.

Provider Wishlist

Every healthcare provider, at one point or another in their career, will reach a point where they feel like their practice would be perfect, if only a certain issue was resolved. These are the top responses for practitioners’ wishlists:

• Easier workflow
• Less administrative work
• More revenue
• Greater patient volumes
• Better patient communication

While it may be surprising that very few of these wants are even tangible items, private practice doctors have made it clear that most of their frustrations boil down to issues with practice management.

For more information on how 99MGMT can help with that so you can spend more time seeing patients and less time filing paperwork, check out our recent blog post!

Most Important

Since we know that most practitioners view success as the road to increased patient volumes, it is unsurprising that what they find to be the most important aspects of success are really just reflections of the hope to grow patient volumes.

Here were the top 5 responses when asked what was most important to their practices’ success:

• 67.2% - delivering top in-person patient experience
• 34.9% - communicating with patients digitally
• 30.5% - having strong online patient reviews
• 26.7% - ranking highly on search engines
• 22.3% - having a high performing website

Greatest Frustrations

As with any job, there are aspects of being a healthcare provider in a private practice that are less than stellar. Practitioners reported the following when asked what their greatest frustrations pertaining to their jobs are:

• 48.7% - managing insurance tasks
• 33.1% - collecting reimbursement
• 31.4% - no-shows and cancellations
• 31.4% - complying with regulations

Much like the issues discussed in the Provider Wishlist section, these frustrations stem back to issues with practice management and how that affects your ability to see patients rather than focusing so much energy on administrative tasks.

Provider Outlook

Unfortunately, the outlook practitioners depicted when asked how they generally feel about the future of private practices is not the brightest.

• 15% are very optimistic
• 29% are optimistic
• 30.2% are neutral
• 21.1% are pessimistic
• 4.7% are very pessimistic

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. This data alludes to the fact that practitioners are aware of flaws in the private practice system, and are actively seeking solutions that will improve their productivity, success, and their futures on the whole.

Are you a physician working in a private practice? Let us know what you think of the results of this survey, and be sure to check out our other blog posts!