The Medical Practice Playbook
Building a Practice Is Like Raising a Child
by Lawrence Jones, MD & Stephen Church, MD
To paraphrase, if you have built one primary care practice, you only know how to build one practice. Steve Church and I were involved in building and growing East Louisville Pediatrics, a successful primary care practice. We know that this is an increasingly rare dinosaur in medicine but would encourage other brave souls to experience the rewards of owning and nurturing your own business.
We cannot tell you all what it takes to make a new medical practice successful. We cannot detail how AI should be integrated into your routine, which EHR is ideal( the answer is likely none) or how to compete with the unfair advantages of hospital owned locations. What we can do is try and detail some general principles that we found fruitful in building and maintaining our business.
Steve Church joined Dan Garcia and Jake Althaus in practice and then I subsequently joined Steve and Dan a few years later. Dan’ s personality is a true force of nature, one of the best physicians I have known, and he was a Pied Piper in pediatrics. Unfortunately, health problems forced him to leave pediatrics. Steve and I were confronted with trying to establish a new practice with a new identity and survive without him. Fortunately, through some combination of luck, serendipity and lots of hard work, we were successful in growing into one of the largest pediatric practices in the area.
Here are some ideas we think others might benefit from.
1. Establish an identity. Branding your practice with name, logo and visibility is important in a city with too many practices. Private practice has the advantage of not looking generic which I think hospital practices are. Pick a name that is different and distinctive, try and find a logo that is unique and memorable and make sure people can see who you are. You will get some business just by being visible to someone driving by. The practice today has a fabulous social media presence on Instagram. In our day, we
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