Maximize your practice's revenue

Forget trying to scale back your overhead — focus on your income

A south-central Ontario group practice did some reorganizing and realized they had an 800-square-foot surplus of office space. They’d already committed to a mortgage on the building, and finding a new doctor to join their group was proving difficult. What to do?

The answer, provided by Practice Solutions consultant Jim Sweeney, was to rent out the surplus office space to other health professionals — in this case, a team of physiotherapists. “This was a win-win opportunity,” says Sweeney, a 37-year veteran of practice management consulting. The group practice got rid of the drag on their finances, while the physiotherapists got access to an office that was already set up for patients.

Renting out extra office space (or even your own office space during hours it goes unused) to ancillary medical services providers or to other doctors, is one of the most effective ways to maximize your practice’s revenue, says Sweeney.

For most physicians, expenses are already as low as they can reasonably go. Unless your staffers are earning outrageous salaries or your waiting room is so lavish that patients just come in to relax, you probably don’t have much fat to trim. That’s why if you want to offset your overhead you’ll have to look at maximizing your revenue, either via new sources (like renting out unused office space) or through existing channels. The most fruitful thing you can do with your existing revenue stream, says Sweeney, is to optimize your billing.

Read the rest of this Practice Management article, which appears in the September issue of Parkhurst Exchange magazine, online here.

Photo: Shutterstock

Get Canadian Medicine news by email or in an RSS reader