As we move along through the
group practice roadmap, we occasionally hit topics that apply not only to the group practice, but also to practically any individual practice. This is one such topic. Here’s the situation in which you may find yourself: your practice may have reached its highest possible level of patient volume or you are one doctor spreading yourself among 2-3 different offices. In either scenario, you are experiencing a fair amount of nonpatient, or “dark” time in the practice. In the first case, your patient base may only merit running 8 days per month – leaving 12-14 work days per month of nonpatient days. In the second case, on the days you are working in Office A, Office B and C are not seeing patients.
On those dark days, doesn’t it make sense to try to make those days productive and profitable rather than simply incur rent, utility or employee costs with no revenue to offset those. Think about this: Let’s say that you are paying $400 per day in costs for your office on dark days including rent, staff costs, etc. If you can bring in just a little bit of money, say $700 net, before those costs, you now make $300 per day in profit instead of losing $400 per day. In a practice with 14 days of dark time per month, you now turn a $5,600 loss per month on dark days (that’s $67,200 per year to you and me) to a profit of $4,200 per month ($50,400 per year). That’s a turnaround of $117,200 per year all payable to you.
Interested? If you are, this means that you have considered, are considering or are working on setting up a multispecialty practice. Here, I’m not just talking about an orthodontic practice including a general dentist or a general dentist adding an orthodontist. I’m talking about more than 2 types of dental specialists including endodontists, periodontists, pediatric dentists, implantologists, etc.
At this point, we’ll talk about some of the considerations involved and then follow up with how to set up your multispecialty practice.