What You Need To Know Before You Set Up Your Own Medical Clinic

What You Need To Know Before You Set Up Your Own Medical Clinic

 

Starting your own medical clinic or medical practice might be something you’ve always wanted to do – it might have been your ultimate aim ever since you began studying medicine many years ago. It does make a lot of sense to do this; it can be an excellent business that will bring you not just money but will enhance your reputation and will offer you a rewarding career helping as many people as you can. 

 

Yet there is more to opening a medical clinic than ‘simply’ knowing a lot about medicine and having plenty of experience (although these things are very important, of course); you will also need to think like a businessperson, and there is a lot to consider. Read on to find out what some of these considerations are. 

 

Photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash

 

Create A Business Plan 

A business plan is going to be a lot of help when you are thinking of opening up a medical clinic of some description. Whether it’s a general clinic or a more specialized one, you are still going to need to have finances in place, and that can mean borrowing from a bank, another lender, or perhaps receiving an investment. You might even be looking for a partner to open your clinic with – they don’t necessarily have to have medical knowledge if they are providing the funds while you provide the expertise. 

 

If your business plan is well thought out and makes financial sense, and if everything is covered within it so that any potential lender or investor can see not only what you need the money for, but how you intend to pay it back, then you are much more likely to get the funding you want. 

 

A business plan is also useful because it can act as a roadmap to help you get where you want to be. Using it as a guide to help you make the right decisions to push your clinic in the direction it needs to go in can be extremely useful, saving you time and stress and preventing you from making potentially costly mistakes. 

 

Get Insured 

When you are running a medical clinic of any kind, insurance is absolutely essential. Working without insurance doesn’t mean you are exceptionally good at what you do and therefore won’t make any errors, it simply means that you are not protecting your patients or yourself in the way you should do. 

 

Everyone makes errors, and even the most qualified and highly practiced doctor has the potential to do so. Although you might not like to think about it, having insurance will ensure that, should anything happen, you can stay protected and your patient will receive the right recompense. 

 

Although this is a cost that all medical professionals will need to pay out, you can still search around until you find the right insurer at the right price; there is sure to be someone out there that suits what you need and that fits with your budget. 

 

Working without insurance doesn’t mean you are exceptionally good at what you do and therefore won’t make any errors, it simply means that you are not protecting your patients or yourself in the way you should do. That alone can harm your medical clinic in many ways than you can imagine. While prioritizing insurance, remember that operational efficiency also matters to your medical clinic. Leveraging a virtual call center to safeguard your business’s medical and financial interests would be beneficial. It will also help you streamline the clinic’s communication platforms to reduce the risk of errors and the usual insurance misunderstandings between patients and medical processes.

 

Find A Practice Manager 

Whether you are planning to be a doctor and see patients or you would prefer to be ‘behind the scenes’ and run the business itself, you are going to need a good practice manager. The practice manager is the person who will hold your clinic together and is essential unless you want to give yourself a lot of extra work to do. 

 

The practice manager is someone you will need to think carefully about before hiring, and it might be that you need to invest a larger sum of money in their salary than you might have initially wanted, but if you have the right person, it will be worth every penny. When you have a strong practice manager in place, you can rest assured that the practice is in safe hands and that every aspect of your clinic, from management to marketing to HR to finding excellent suppliers and sourcing prescription doctor dispensing plus so much more, is being dealt with. You’ll certainly need someone with a lot of experience, ideally in a medical setting, because they will have a lot of responsibility, and will be able to take a lot of the pressure off you, enabling you to concentrate on your patients. 

 

Choose A Good Location 

The location of your clinic is going to be one of the biggest considerations; get it wrong, and no one will come even if you do have a great reputation and have spent money making the clinic look and feel good. Get it right, and you’ll have plenty of people willing to try you out and hopefully come back every time they need medical assistance. 

 

When it comes to picking a good location, you’ll need to consider:

• Foot traffic – do a lot of people walk past? 
• Public transport – are there bus stops nearby?
• Access – is the clinic accessible to everyone who is going to need to visit, including those in wheelchairs? 

 

Once you have found the ideal location and have everything else in place, your plans can really start to come together.