Establishing and growing a private practice creates a bewildering array of admin, compliance, HR, IT and many other areas to manage. Along with this are endlessly repeating tasks of preparing and processing accounts and then following them up to make sure you get paid.
Your ability to manage and develop your practice directly links to your ability to manage this administration.
Admin burden
Surgeons and physicians typically become employers by hiring administration assistants, practice managers and secretaries. Becoming an employer opens up more HR compliance and management issues that continue to influence practice growth.
All of this can become a distraction from the core of the practice: your role as a surgeon or a physician.
Although these tasks may be getting done, if they eat into the time that you can dedicate to your specialty, then your practice is unlikely to grow and prosper.
Common problems we see eating up the time of a surgeon or a physician are:
- Patient follow-up tasks, such as chasing results
- Management of patient data
- Invoicing, collecting payments and chasing down overdue accounts
- Managing staff from recruitment, through to training, conduct, managing performance and handling resignations
- Managing superannuation, entitlements and annual leave
- Building referral source for the practice
Administration can account for anywhere between 20-50% of your working time, which is not hard to imagine considering the above list of obligations.
Our offering is designed to help people like you. We remove the administration burden from our doctors so that they have more time to do as they wish – whether that’s working more, spending more time with family or pursuing their interests and hobbies.
How we do it
Too often we see surgeons and physician spending more time managing their staff than consulting with patients. You shouldn’t have to think about chasing results, payments or managing staff, which is why we manage this whole process for you.
By using Doctors Accounts Services, our team becomes your team. Hiring, managing leave and temporary staff, reviewing performance and managing conflict is all done on our end, so you can dedicate 100% of your time to being a surgeon or a physician, rather than an employer.
Our services are flexible depending on our client’s needs, but here are a few that are core to our offering:
- Billing
- Outsourced practice staff, so you don’t need to worry about HR or performance and conduct issues
- Answering phones and directing calls
- Responding to all non-medical queries from patients and assistance in responding to medical queries
- Practice management
- List management (organising theatre time and theatre lists, ensuring patients are prepared and know when to turn up and where to go)
- Anaesthetists for lists (liaising with secretaries for regular anaesthetists, arranging ad hoc anaesthetic cover and liaising with ad hoc anaesthetists’ secretaries)
- Banking
- Medicare and Health Fund registrations, hospital accreditations
- Fee estimates and informed financial consent
- Organisation and management of BPAY and credit card payment facilities
- Electronic claims to Health Funds
- GST reporting
- Monthly reports to track your billing and prepare your BAS
- Consulting rooms
Cost of our services
Our fee structure means that we are partnering with you as your practice grows. There are no fixed overheads that you must incur and no set rate that you have to pay.
Our services are inexpensive compared to other alternatives.
Hiring a practice manager or a secretary can cost up to $85,000 per annum per staff member. Rooms can cost $35,000 per annum. Then there are insurances (worker’s compensation and occupiers liability insurance), software and other IT, office consumables, furniture and even magazine subscriptions for the waiting room!
Most of these are fixed costs. This means once you commit to this path, you incur these costs regardless of whether you earn any private practice income!
Our fees are linked directly to your revenue. We are partnering with you as your practice grows. Therefore, we only get paid if you get paid.
We do rely on lock-in contracts – you are never required to commit to our services for a specified period. You are welcome to use our services however much you wish to.
If you’re ready to invest in a better way to manage your business and begin seeing the returns, contact us today. For more information about Doctors’ Accounts Services, find out who we are.