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A veteran oncologist in the Midwest recently wanted to relocate his practice 55 miles away. To do that, he needed $250,000 for equipment and furnishings and a $250,000 line of [...]

Maybe you've seen the ads in a computer magazine. Such-and-such software or hardware, they claim, works without a hitch right out of the box. Getting started isn't so simple when [...]

Every so often, a new patient of internist Jean Antonucci in Farmington, ME, looks puzzled when the doctor herself--and not a medical assistant--walks into the waiting room and escorts him [...]

A cash-only practice may sound unconventional, but that's only because doctors are accustomed to the healthcare industry's third-party payer system. In the rest of life--whether it's buying clothes, paying an [...]

'I blew up a successful practice,' says Pittsburgh pediatrician Scott Serbin. Serbin once had 3,000 patients, an outward sign of success. Yet like other doctors seeing more and more patients [...]

When FP Sumi Sexton in Arlington, VA, looks ahead a few days on her schedule and sees that 50 to 60 percent of her appointment slots are blank, she doesn't [...]

For physicians, the pressure to adopt electronic health records comes from every conceivable direction. President Bush wants an EHR for every American by 2014 (1), and Medicare (2) and private [...]

Medical software for handheld computers is slowly but surely going online and wireless. A new distribution model for software is emerging, and it's paired with a major change in hardware. [...]

'Pay the copayment while you're in the office, or pay a penalty. Bounce a check, pay a penalty. We take MasterCard, Discover, or Visa.' Some doctors' offices have gone sign-crazy, [...]

A lot is riding on how you schedule patients. Do it wrong, and they may abandon you for a walk-in retail clinic. The k art of scheduling is a balancing [...]

The first lesson about negotiations with health insurers is this: Don't throw in the towel before the fight even starts. Granted, it's understandable that doctors, especially those in small practices, [...]

In a typical one- or two-doctor practice, the billing and collection department consists of one person. If you're lucky, he's a pro, who aces everything from entering charges to appealing [...]

Confronted with declining reimbursements and sky-high malpractice premiums, physicians are finding creative ways to reduce operating expenses without layoffs. In the war against rising costs, nothing is off limits. Cost-cutting [...]

Many doctors surrender thousands of hard-earned dollars each year through coding missteps they could easily avoid. The errors and omissions don't amount to much individually. But multiplied over a year, [...]

Shopping for an electronic health record system can be an unpleasant surprise. It happens when you hear a quote for EHR software--say $13,000 per provider--and forget that software constitutes just [...]

When you judge a baseball hitters output, what numbers do you study? Hits? Runs? Runs batted in? Batting average? Slugging percentage? Likewise, you have your choice of stats for defining [...]

Doctors solve other people's health problems all day long. Meanwhile, they're often desperate for somebody to solve their practice management problems. Health plan hassles, hectic schedules, coding rigmarole, efforts to [...]

Creating a paperless office starts with choosing the electronic health record software that's right for you. But then another choice rears its head: What hardware will you use to view [...]

For the busy physician, the office manager is indispensable to success and sanity. Yet it's easy to take a good office manager for granted. If insurers rarely deny claims, perhaps [...]

Medicine is all about probabilities--the probability of a calcium channel blocker averting a stroke, of a Pap smear detecting abnormal cells, of a Botox injection making it difficult to swallow. [...]

When internist Henry Waiters in Statesville, NC, commissioned a new office a few years back, he said, "Make it bigger." "I wasn't looking for a Taj Mahal, but I wanted [...]

At the Price Chopper supermarket in Putnam, CT, right behind the pharmacy and next to the cough syrup and Tylenol, a 160-doctor medical group called ProHealth Physicians operates a glorified [...]

No doubt about it--hiring a locum tenens physician is costly. However, it's costlier if you don't. If you belong to a group practice, a substitute doctor with the fancy Latin [...]

The world is flush with time management experts, but for gastroenterologist James Brown in Wenatchee, WA, nobody beats Morn as the ultimate authority. 'My mother always said 'Do it now, [...]

If you think that aging buckets are what you find in a janitor's closet or a winery, you're probably not steeped in the science of billing and collection. In contrast, [...]

Michael Gray, a CPA in San Jose, CA, recalls the high-roller client who asked him to review a preliminary tax return he had prepared himself with off-the-shelf software. Gray caught [...]

Are you waiting for something to happen to your practice, or are you ready to make something happen? You may already know what you need to do to make your [...]

Vic Wood of Wheeling, WV, is one tough hombre. As a football player at West Liberty State College, Wood took his licks returning punts and kickoffs, and dished them out [...]

Is turning down new patients the best way to care for your current patients? After all, a too-large patient panel often translates into practice chaos: glacial waits for appointments, rushed [...]

Already ubiquitous in hotels, coffee shops, schools, libraries, airports, and homes, wireless (or Wi-Fi) networks are making inroads in physician offices, too. They're spreading because electronic health records are spreading. [...]

Your future's in the cards--credit and debit cards. The vast majority of physician practices already accept plastic, but the volume of swipes could jump significantly, given the push for consumer-driven [...]

Stat! This abbreviation of the Latin word b meaning "at once" describes a quick response to a medical emergency. But, it could just as easily be the sort of response [...]

Great product, lousy service. Any consumer can face that problem. You buy the best furnace on the market, for instance, but the local dealer installs it the wrong way. Medical [...]

Almost a year after Hurricane Katrina scrambled the lives of thousands like New Orleans internist David Myers, the process of getting back to normal has been agonizingly slow, marked by [...]

Power Points * Federal and state governments will distribute vaccines and antiviral drugs. * A pandemic may keep 40 percent of your staff off the job. * In a pandemic, [...]

He cut an almost boyish figure sitting at the defense table, this slender, 5-foot-7-inch ophthalmologist with short red hair, a stony face, and a penetrating gaze. Unless he wins an [...]

You can't turn around an aircraft carrier in a couple of minutes. Doctors are learning that it's no small thing to turn around an insurance carrier, either. Organized medicine set [...]

Ferguson Medical Group and Missouri Delta Medical Center are virtually next-door neighbors in the small town of Sikeston, MO, about 140 miles south of St. Louis. In between them stands [...]

When the website for Bristol Park Medical Group in suburban Los Angeles debuted in 1999, it was like most practice websites back then--basically just an advertisement. Not any longer. First [...]

Last December, someone smashed the window of a car belonging to an employee of Providence Health System in Oregon and stole computer backup tapes and disks containing records of 365,000 [...]

So, what's your practice worth, Doctor? In a good mood, you might say a million bucks. Or 10 bucks when you're an hour behind schedule. However, there are times when [...]

Indianapolis allergist David Patterson boasts that he hardly ever leaves the exam room. When he needs a medical assistant to help him with a rhinoscopy, he doesn't walk over to [...]

A few years back, internist Eugene Ogrod was walking along the bridge that connected is office building to the hospital when he bumped into a surgeon to whom he regularly [...]

Maybe you're so swamped by patients that the subject of clean claims isn't high on your priority list--no higher, maybe, than clean jeans. Or clean clams. But failing to ensure [...]