Medical Office Models: Which Setup Is Right for Your Practice?

If your practice will be entirely hospital-based, you can probably skip this one (looking at you Path, Rads and ER). But if you’re like most of us, you’ll need some kind of external space to see patients. Before you sign a lease or start furnishing a room, it’s worth knowing your options for medical office models.

One more thing before we get into it: your office arrangement and your admin setup are linked.

If your admin (aka The Boss) isn’t working remotely, they need somewhere to sit. And if you want them to stick around, that environment matters. Worth thinking through before you commit to anything.

The Classic: One Doctor, One Office

This is what most of us pictured growing up. One doctor, one space, one admin running the show.

The upside is control. You decide how the office runs, which EMR you use, what procedures happen there, and how the culture feels (the vibes). If you’re not in five days a week, you may even be able to rent unused days to another physician and offset some overhead.

The downside is that all the overhead lands on you. Setup takes time, money, and energy. And in the early days, you’ll likely be handling more of the administrative load than you’d like.

The Group Office

Joining a group often (but not always) means sharing a space. Members typically rotate days in the office versus the hospital, and overhead gets divided accordingly.

Pros: typically less overall overhead, you may or may not need to bring in your own admin, and you’re not responsible for managing every detail of how the office runs. On days when you and your colleagues overlap, it’s a great way to get their thoughts on cases when you need to bounce ideas off of someone (especially when navigating that first year of practice).

The trade-offs: confirm upfront exactly which days and resources you have access to. Changes to how the office runs require buy-in from others, which takes more effort than making a call on your own. And shared space always has the potential to get tight.

Renting Space from Another Physician

This one doesn’t come up enough in conversations about medical office models, and it should.

If most of your work is hospital-based and you only need a clinical space one or two days a week, renting from a physician who has capacity is worth exploring. You pay only for the days you use. They get to lessen their own overhead. It can be a win for everyone.

The catch is finding the right fit: a doctor with available days that match your schedule, and enough infrastructure to support your patients. There may not be a dedicated workstation for your admin. And there’s no long-term guarantee the arrangement stays available or stays ideal.

Maybe You Cant Get Away Without One

Even if you’re in a speciality where most colleagues have an office outside the hospital, depending on what resources are available, you may be able to get away without one. I have a couple colleagues who have this set up.

They are specialists. They are willing to travel between different sites, and because of this, have enough hospital resources that their week is full and they don’t need an office. Their admin is set up to work remotely.

There are huge potential (namely overhead) wins to this set up. But it won’t be available to everyone as it is hospital-resource dependent. It might take some creativity, but it can be possible and can immediately simplify administrative load and overhead costs.

Start Somewhere. You can change.

These three models don’t cover every possibility.

Be creative. One colleague of mine rented one day a week from a local oral and maxillofacial surgery group while he got started. Another built access to five clinical days across various hospital sites, set up his admin virtually, and hasn’t thought about his medical office model logistics since.

You don’t need to find your forever setup on day one. It’s to find something that works to get going, keeps overhead manageable and then as you settle into practice figure out what exactly you need and want.