The Future of Small Medical Practices

One of the questions I get most often relates to the future of small practices in healthcare. I’ve heard a lot of people make really great arguments for why small medical practices have an extremely challenging future in healthcare. We’ve all heard stories of large healthcare organizations eating up small medical practices left and right.

For the longest time, I’ve argued that this is all just part of a cycle of doctors selling to hospitals and then doctors hating life as an employed doctor and so they return to running their own practice. This cycle seems to be playing out and most doctors still hate being employees. However, there are a lot of other forces at play that makes it harder for doctors to go out and start their own independent medical practice again.

As I look at the biggest healthcare trends, none of them point to a brighter future for the small, independent medical practice. In fact, most of them make it even harder for small medical practices to survive.

For example, the shift to value based reimbursement is something that should be a great thing for small medical practices that have been known to provide the highest quality, personalized care. While this is true, must of value based reimbursement is as much about understanding and applying the data to a population in order to improve the overall health. How many small practices are going to be capable to do this type of data analysis?

If you extrapolate this further, it’s hard to imagine a future healthcare system that’s not built on the back of data. If that’s the case, he who holds the data holds the power. It’s worth asking if even the hospitals and health systems will be large enough to have the data they need on their patients. Or will even the largest hospitals and health systems need to work with massive companies like Google and Amazon who are currently collecting data at rates that no hospital could even consider?

This is a scary and exciting future that is a topic for another post. However, from a small practice perspective, this could be a good thing. If large corporations like Google and Amazon have the data needed to improve healthcare, then it’s possible that those corporations will enable small practices to survive. It could level the playing field for small practices that are trying to compete with large health systems.

What’s certain is that every healthcare organization is going to have to move beyond just the EHR. Sure, the EHR will be a requirement for every medical practice, but I believe it will only be the start. For small and large medical practices to survive, they’re going to have to start exploring what other technology they can implement to provide a better patient experience. The good thing is that small practices can be nimble and implement new technology quickly and without as much bureaucracy. The hard part is that they have to do so with a smaller budget.

What do you think about the future of small medical practices? Will they survive? Should we be making efforts to make sure they survive?