List of Things that Keeps Your Doctor’s Private Practice Functioning

 

Lately, there has been talk that there will soon be no more private medical practices as we know them today. Privately owned medical practices are certainly on the decline. All one has to do is open up their yellow pages and they see will fewer and fewer private medical practices in listings.

I have compiled a list from my own experience, working as a nurse in the medical field, as to what it takes for a doctor to operate his/her small business. The list of things I mention here are by no means complete. There are many other factors that doctors must do in order to keep their businesses in operation.

Listed below are just some of the things a medical doctor needs in order to keep their offices functioning on a day to day basis:

Office Rental and Utilities. Doctors pay for rental space for their offices that they practice in. They pay for all the items that go inside their medical offices, like the flat-screen television and cable you watch while waiting, all the decorations, and furniture too. Doctors must also pay for the electricity used, the water and sewage fees, telephone and fax, and high-speed internet services. But these are only a fraction of the items doctors pay for inside their medical offices.

Furniture. Furniture not only includes the chairs and sofas in the waiting area, but also includes all the desk chairs and desks their staff uses. They pay for all the examining tables and chairs in each of the patient rooms along with all the cabinetry and sink basins within those rooms. They pay for the flooring that you walk on within their offices.

Supplies. Doctors also pay for hundreds of supplies they need to keep on hand for use on their patients. This includes, but is not limited to, bandages, cotton swabs, alcohol packet swabs, patient disposable gowns, sterile kits, boxes of several different sized needles, boxes of several different sized plungers for injections, scalpels, different sized suture kits, staples removal kits, suture removal kits, basins, tourniquets, tongue depressors, culture kits, sterile and clean specimen kits and tubes.

Then there are the other sort of supplies you would expect to find in most other kinds of offices or businesses, like toilet paper, paper towels, soap, and soap dispensers. Plus, you will find inside their medical offices paper, all sorts of different types of medical forms, pens, pencils, medical files and folders, different types of stickers that indicate different messages depending their color, and so on and so on.

Equipment. Medical doctor offices also pay for a multitude of different equipment, like thermometers, sphygmomanometers (blood pressure cuffs), stethoscopes, otoscopes (used to look inside your ears and throat), Doppler machine (to verify a pulse when one cannot be felt), EKG machine (used to read a patient’s heart rhythm), computers and several kinds of different special computer software, fax machine, and special disposal canisters for disposing bio-hazardous equipment and body fluids and tissues.

Other Costs. Doctors, well most doctors, pay small business liability insurance. Most doctors are required by law to pay for malpractice medical insurance. When patients do not pay their portion of the doctor visit, the doctor has to ‘eat’ that cost.

Repairs. Doctors also must pay for any repairs that need to be done to their medical equipment and other things within the office, like the air-conditioning and heating unit repairs, electrical fixture repairs, and plumbing issues.

Employees. Doctors must pay their staff members that include office secretaries, office managers, nurses, certified medical assistance, nurse practitioners, and perhaps even another medical doctor he has hired. Doctors also pay for any specialists that come to their offices to provided special services that their office staff members do not perform like Ultrasound technicians and x-ray technicians. Doctors also pay for other service personnel like janitorial services.

Themselves. Doctors also need to pay themselves for the work they perform for their patients.

This list of things that keeps a doctor’s office running day to day is not complete. However, it does reveal some interesting things that most people do not take into consideration while they are at their doctor’s office for a visit. Honestly, most people who are not feeling well do not really care what it takes to keep a doctor’s office open – I know I certainly don’t when I’m sick. But after having read this article you may now know what all is involved when doctors decide how much to charge for patient office visits.