Business Advice for Physicians: Why We Can’t Apply It Directly (And What to Do Instead)

Hey guess what? You are a business. (🤯) Whether you’re on an AFP or fee-for-service, if you’re running a medical practice, you are running a business. Most of us (read: me) didn’t quite get that memo.

Business advice is everywhere. Business advice for physicians that matches the nuance of medicine is more difficult to come by.

The problem is very few of the good, solid business principles translate directly. And if you’ve ever tried to apply standard business advice to your practice, you’ve probably already discovered why.

The Advice Sounds Great Until It Doesn’t

Take this one: find the thing you do that makes the most money, do more of it and stop doing everything else.

In a traditional business? Solid logic.

In medicine? If I applied that strictly, I’d stop doing hand trauma. Nail bed injuries, hand infections, fractures. Not the highest codes. Can’t exactly take them off the menu. Nor do I want to.

Or this one: volume fixes almost everything. No audience? More posts. Bad at sales? More reps.

For most Canadian physicians, low volume is not the problem. Overwhelming volume is the thing currently threatening to swallow us whole. The wait list is only getting longer. The issue is how we manage the volume without running ourselves into the ground.

And then there’s the hourly rate rule: calculate what your time is worth per hour, and anything you can pay someone else to do for less than that, delegate it.

This one is actually the closest to useful. And one I advocate for, but with caveat. The translation isn’t direct. Because there are tasks that don’t bill as much but still require us. The rounds before clinic. The difficult family conversation after a procedure. You can’t outsource those, regardless of what the math says.

What We Do With It Instead

None of this means we throw out the advice. We can translate it.

Take the volume problem. We can’t just pile on more patients necessarily, but we can look at where we can leverage our time. And this is where the power of our schedules shine.

A gynecologist colleague books quick phone calls while their patient is getting changed. Same block of time, one more patient through. Not for every situation, but for certain result reviews or straightforward follow ups, it works.

On the revenue side: we’re not going to stop doing the work that matters because it doesn’t bill as well. But talk to colleagues about codes they use. Make sure you’re in alignment with them. Look at the billing book again (a real slog, but sometimes there can be hidden gems in there).

And the hourly rate rule? We can apply the spirit of it. Does this task require an MD? If not, who else could do it, and what would that cost compared to what your time is worth? That question can be impressively freeing.

The Short Version

Is traditional business advice useful for physicians? Yes, but it needs translation. The concepts hold up. The direct application almost never does.

Can we just think of ourselves as businesses and ignore the rest? No. The context is too different. But the principles that make a business run well, knowing what only you can do, knowing what your time is worth, building systems so the routine stuff runs without you, those do.

The physicians who figure out the translation are the ones getting their time back. That’s the power of thinking of yourself as a business. And it doesn’t mean turning your practice into an impersonal machine.

It’s about treating patients in a way that you feel good about while also not costing you your life.

There’s more to dig into, on translating business advice for physicians and more topics, and soon we’ll be having deeper conversations. Stay tuned. 👀