My good friend Frank Cohen (www.cpahealth.com) recently received the following email from a friend of his who is a physician. It is really quite sad but reflects the state of affairs we often find with our physician clients; any follow up comments to this email from the readership??:
Dear Frank;
How are you? Hope all is well and the new year is firmly in God's hands!
I need your help! I cannot seem to define the problem in my practice. I have a practice that excludes endoscopies and breast problems, yet emphasizes the minimally invasive approach to all forms of other general surgical issues. I have an EMR that works well and without difficulty but I am being suspended from hospital practice for record incompletion. I have a compassionate level of care and can endear patients to refer friends and family as well as bake pies. I fail to have the volume consistently that allows me to make more than $100,000. Despite this, I fail to have any malpractice events since starting practice here exactly 3 years ago. I am having a hard time paying for medication, repair of house or cars as I think necessary. I think that my product is really good for $300,000, so that I wonder if I am missing something. Certainly, I have been in prayer about this and also with patients.
I obtained the Ingenix percentile surgical charges for my zip code and am charging the 75 percentile amount for most of my procedures.
My questions are do I have a practice? Am I losing money in any way that I can stop? What is missing? How do you need the data to perform the analysis that you did previously? Thank you.
All my best,
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