Customer Reviews

Practice Management: A Practical Guide to Starting and Running a Medical Office

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Residency is over, and now it's time to get a real job and get on with your career. This book offers lots of advice - sometimes brilliant, sometimes silly. But always blunt and easy to understand. The author does not waste a lot of words being "nuanced".

First, the brilliant advice: group practices are often in chaos because there is no ultimate boss; doctors who do not know how to benchmark business processes and read financial statements are asking for their office managers to rob them blind; cost control should permeate all aspects of your activity; and insurance companies will yank around those they can yank around.

The author offers countless "pearls of wisdom", and they reveal his bias and personality traits. The author is a micro-manager who suggests "do not hiring an office manager - just do it yourself"; and "you must make a habit of doing everybody's job, periodically". The author is is also an incredible tightwad: "My definition of a big expense is anything over $20!" The author does not mention quality of life issues - maybe being home for dinner at a reasonable hour by delegating menial tasks to others - he preaches total involvement in all matters of minutia.

The author also preaches "when in doubt, always go for a solo practice!" and he provides negotiating pearls of wisdom that virtually guarantee that no practice will ever, ever hire you (avoid non-compete clauses; insist that the insurance contracts be in your own name (and not in the name of the practice); you must be allowed to take your patients with you when you leave...

The truly bad advice comes from his definition of "computerized medical records" - he thinks that doctors should cut-and-paste simple templates in cheap word processing software. That may have been a solution back in Ronald Reagan's second term, but it is laughably inept in today's world of Electronic Health Records Software, Application Service Providers and tablet PCs. Also, his debt-averse nature implores doctors to shun home mortgages: "The one thing that will ruin you financially is your house." Either pay for it in cash, or "should you need to borrow, do not borrow more than 1-2x your annual after-taxes income." You can search near and far, but nobody else will give you that pearl of wisdom.

In summary, this book is a collection of good and bad advice. And the blunt, opinionated style that is responsible for the good advice is also the source of the bad advice.

Hi, I am a hospitalist and have been thinking of going into private practice hence the purchase of this book. Its an okay book. I was able to gather a sense of what to expect if i were to open up my practice say few months down the road. Having said that, certain aspects of the 'advice' i didnot agree to. The author is suggesting to do the following:
1. Be the MD running the practice (of course we are)
2. Be the boss of the practice (okay, if i am in solo practice)
3. Be the office manager (or try to be one)
4. Be the coder
5. Be the biller
6. Be the receptionist
7. Manage your own portfolio (financial/stock market etc).......Got the idea?

If i am a novice in the world of pvt.practice how do you expect me to be all of the above at the same time? especially initially.
I felt the book lacked all in all mature advice and it had too many open ended, general pearls of wisdom.
Would i suggest this to a peer? May be as your first book so that you can get a hang of things and to get a general idea but doubt you will find any solid advice.

I own an online medical supply and equipment business and am also a legal aid hotline attorney. I regularly deal with a number of physcian groups. While the author presented some good ideas, I have to say that overall this is not a very useful book. Yes, it is important to be on top of what is going on in your office but that does not mean you have to actually do everything yourself. Physicians do not learn anything about running a practice or office or managing support staff in medical school. Those duties as well as billing and coding are best left to those with training and experience in these complex areas. A good billing service can mean alot more fees collected. Hire good people and supervise them carefully, but don't be a micro-manager. The advice about computer software the books provides is outdated and inadequate for most practices. The author's suggestion to stick with a solo practice does not make sense for most physicians in today's competative market. Large groups have a competative advantage and have more leverage with insurance companies and hospitals. Plus, if you join a mult--specialty group, you have built in source of referrals. And I agree that the typos were quite distracting.

I have spent a fortune on medical practice books recently. This book is full of unique, useful tips that no other book has yet to cover. The author does not tippy toe around the issues and provides frank advice on the business of private medical practice. I only wish the book was longer and covered more topics.

I read a lot of practice management books, but this one is the only one written by a practicing doctor. The author obviously knows what he is talking about because he is in the middle of it all. I wish I would have read it earlier, it would have saved me some costly mistakes.

Excellent pointers overall. Style is easy to follow and witty. I highly recommend it for doctors who are new to private practice as well as those who already have their own offices. The chapter on business strategies was particularly relevant to me.

A condensed practice management book. An easy, interesting read, with lots of good pointers and advice to serve as a starting point or food for thought for those already in practice. The author is sharp-minded and witty, if a bit paranoid ('do everything yourself / it won't get done right unless you do it yourself' approach).

This is an unusual and well written book. The author is a doctor with experience running an office, opinionated and bold in his approach. Other books I read on practice management were dull by comparison. The main advantage of this book is that it gives pointed advice. Let's face it: when it comes to practice management some things work and others don't. This author does a very good job explaining what has worked for him and what not. I believe it is helpful to get the views of someone who is in the trenches, so to speak. His opinions are strong and well stated. The style is readable and witty. You may not agree with him, but you always know why he did what he did. This book advocates a hands-on approach. For example, the chapter on billings emphasizes the need to learn to code and do billings in house. I think many doctors loose a lot of money by not coding correctly. The chapter on malpractice emphasizes the need to write good notes and gives a very interesting admonition, one well worth following. There are "pearls of wisdom" sprinkled throughout the book. Many of them are practical and some are obviously tongue-in-cheek, which works well to illustrate a point. His advice is sometimes unorthodox, but that is an advantage because it forced me to stop and think about what I was doing. I must say I am surprised to see the comments of other reviewers who criticize the author for his hands-on approach. If you are going to open a business of your own, you better learn how to run it. I think that should be obvious. If you accept the notion that you need to be involved in your business, this book does a very good job of showing you how to run it.

In conclusion this is a very good book for those doctors who favor a hands-on approach to their practices. In fact, if you are going to have your own business, you might as well run it hands-on and not be too dependent on office managers and employees who don't care about your success.

As an R.N./Manager of a rural clinic, I bought this with expectations of a manual of day to day operations. Scheduling, personnel conflict,(beyond just firing bad employees), how to deal with patients who pose a challenge, i.e. drug seekers. Things of that nature. I realize now that I'm the wrong audience for this text. It is geared more to residents and new M.D.s I understand that, but the thing that made me crazy was all of the typos. Skimming through, I found five typos. The amusing part was the emphasis in the book of cutting staff down to minimum-apparently that goes for copy editors as well.
Skip this for pure medical office management-probably useful for M.D.'s starting, or finding themselves confused.

This book was pretty awful. I expected a thoughtful and well-educated approach to the subject matter at hand. Instead, this book was very brash (and not very well edited).

As others have noted, it is good if you want to get an overall understanding of the ins and outs of a medical practice. However, it leaves much to be desired with regard to thorough advice I would feel comfortable following on the specific topics mentioned. The author definitely needs to become more educated in the way of computers, for that section was highly outdated even for 2004 (when the book was published).

Having started a solo practice after being with an HMO, I'm always on the lookout for new ways to make my practice better. This book, however, isn't one of them. The advice at times to be a little inconsistant, going between doing it all yourself (which is what I'm doing) and hiring a practice consultant. His methods for dealing with employees is quite heavy handed - I'm quite sure I wouldn't want to work for him.

His comments on EMR software is quite laughably bad - using Word to do notes is so old and inefficent that I'm willing to bet a lot of things must slip between the cracks in his practice.

Overall, its tough to recommend this book because the advice is off on things like EMRs, and the employee managing style is written by someone who obviously doesn't have a lot of leadership experience.