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- Presentation
How to Start and Run a Successful Private Practice
Description
Monacy Ladrigan, a physician with 14 years in private practice, shares practical advice on how to start and run a successful practice by first clarifying what you dislike about employment and then building a business around your non-negotiables. She emphasizes starting small, funding retirement early and automatically, and understanding that time in the market matters. She recommends minimizing early credentialing so you can closely track claims and learn from denials, choosing a modest space and staff, and only adding what you truly need. She also stresses using delayed benefit eligibility to protect the practice, planning for lawsuits with the help of an estate planning attorney, maximizing malpractice coverage, and knowing state-specific options. A major theme is systematization: create SOPs for everything, automate workflows like waitlists, collect payments at the time of service, and use visual tags to help staff manage insurance types and cosmetic visits. She advises understanding your numbers, overhead, reimbursements, taxes, and compensation structure, and using bonuses strategically for helpful actions rather than annual expectations. Hiring should focus on emotional intelligence, reliability, and in-person interviews, while internal referrals should be handled carefully. Finally, she urges physicians to treat practice-building as part of their job, protect time for family and partners, stay connected to their “why,” and use that purpose to sustain the demands of entrepreneurship.
View moreConclusions
- Starting a private dermatology practice is achievable if you push past uncertainty, accept that courage is developed rather than innate, and focus on what you can control.
- The most important financial move is to fund retirement early and automatically, because time in the market and compounding create a major advantage.
- A successful startup practice should begin small, with limited space, a lean staff, and only a few payers so the practice can learn and adapt before scaling.
- Office design and workflow choices matter, and thoughtful layouts, equipment duplication, and efficient room setups can improve both patient flow and staff productivity.
- Preparing for legal risk is essential, so early estate planning and robust malpractice coverage should be treated as core business infrastructure.
- Protecting personal priorities and support systems is critical, because sustainable practice ownership requires boundaries around family time and relationships.
- Standard operating procedures for every repeated task reduce decision fatigue, improve onboarding, and make the practice more consistent and scalable.
- Operational discipline around scheduling, waitlists, payment collection, and payer tagging helps improve revenue and reduce confusion.
- Knowing the full economics of the practice, including overhead, reimbursements, rejected codes, and total compensation, is necessary for sound management.
- Hiring should prioritize emotional maturity and fit, since the best employees are detail-oriented, self-aware, and able to handle responsibility.
- A practice owner must treat themselves as the business’s primary product and actively market, network, and create time for business decisions.
- Staying connected to a personal and professional purpose helps sustain the demands of practice ownership and makes the challenge more meaningful.
- The talk’s overall conclusion is that private practice succeeds when clinical skill is paired with business ownership, systems, boundaries, and intentional growth.
- Suzanne McGoey, MD, MPH, FAAD
- Manasi Ladrigan, MD, FAAD