My first week of ophthalmology solo pracrice

Howie’s notes: when you first open you’ll need the time to train on everything and learn how to run your office. If you know how to do every task, no employee will ever be able to hold you hostage or be irreplaceable. Don’t feel like you need to do stuff you don’t want to do such as see vision plan patients or do inpatient and ER consults just to get patients though the door (but if these fit into your long term plans by all means go for it). Focus on the long term goal of running your practice efficiently.

Yes seven years later everyone in our google group including myself and Ho Sun who uses EyeMD still thinks it’s great.

You don’t need a tech when you’re starting from scratch. Five years later I still have only one employee and Ho Sun two. 15 patients is the most I can handle without a tech unless some of them are quick IOP checks or post ops. Many folks fresh out of training might be eager to see as many patients as possible, and in some ways this is wise to get clinical experience, but you can make a great living running a low overhead micropractice. Indeed, many (but not all) folks who are independently wealthy would prefer to chuck their 50 patient per day mill and not have to deal with the headaches and keep it simple and run a small practice.

Similarly, you don’t need every piece of equipment when you’re first starting out. Comprehensive ophthalmologists will still want a OCT which was the most expensive ticket in my start up. But five years later I still don’t have a Yag laser and do the procedures at my ASC. This is off topic, but this makes it MUCH more expensive for society due to ASC facility fees, which can be multiples of the surgeon fee, and more expensive for the patient (copay or coinsurance for the facility fee). Most of our google group has a Yag simply for the convenience of going to the ASC and to attract more referrals. My Yag volume simply isn’t high enough to justify getting one for my office. If you decide you want one, you could wait six months after opening until you’re in the black and your credit score is better to proceed. You probably won’t be doing that many the first few months after opening day.

If you’re a retina specialist, you may not need a visual field to start off with. And to conserve capital I didn’t even get a second exam lane until last month, my fifth year in practice. This may be overkill, but my point is you don’t have to open up with three exam lanes and every piece of equipment. Add it gradually.

One key metric is your revenue per patient seen. This is calculated by total revenue divided by total encounters (including surgeries and postop visits). Don’t bother calculating it your first few months of practice because your payments will probably be delayed. For comprehensive ophthalmologists, it’s all over the map, from $130-200, I’ve heard many folks are around $150. This would be a good number to use for pro forms projections (which I didn’t do; I winged it and had no idea what my income would be, when I first started up). It depends on your insurance reimbursements, number of procedures, surgical density, aggressiveness with elective cash pay procedures, whether you take vision insurance, whether your are conservative with testing or overtest, etc. For retina and oculoplastics specialists I hear the revenue per patient is higher. Retina perhaps $180-250(?).

An important point about benchmarks is they aren’t a be all end all. If you are higher or lower than national averages it’s important to understand why, but you may purposely want to keep things that way. For example, my total revenue is way less than than average, but my overhead is also much lower at 30% (36% with equipment deductions). We will have a post on benchmarking later!