Congratulations! You’ve Graduated Residency. Now What?

Congratulations!

You’ve graduated from your residency.

After a long, stressful time in medical school, and a finished residency, you’re now free to practice medicine the way you see fit.

So you’re probably thinking about what the start of your medical career will look like.

Here at Symbiosis, our medical coworking space is geared toward helping you with how to start a medical practice, even if you’re fresh out of your residency.

But is that your best option?

Let’s take a look.

Career Options For A Residency Graduate

There are so many different career options for you to consider once you’ve graduated from your residency.

If you’re very passionate about education, you can be a clinician educator.

A clinician educator’s primary role is to formally incorporate educational principles and scholarship into their patient care.

They also usually stay on as faculty in medical schools, residency programs, or fellowship programs.

If your passion is research, then you can embark on a career as a clinician scientist.

As a clinician scientist, you’ll spend your time pursuing bench research, clinical research, epidemiological research, or clinical trials.

Another option is to pursue physician advocacy and public policy.

As a physician, you’re in a unique position to understand the needs of your patients.

You can leverage your influence to change your healthcare system’s delivery, impact political policy, and lower social barriers that prevent access to healthcare.

This can be done at the federal, state, or municipal level depending on your interest.

Similarly, if your interest lies in policy work you can also choose to be a physician administrator.

The last couple of years spent battling COVID-19 showed how important it is to have effective healthcare leaders in administrative positions.

Finally, you can of course choose to practice clinical medicine.

This is the area for you if your passion is patient care, and can be in a private or group setting.

Should You Start Your Own Private Practice Immediately After Residency?

Starting your own practice is one of the many options after you graduate your residency, and can be extremely rewarding.

But, if you feel that you’re too green, you can choose to join an existing clinic or look for a corporate medical job.

You should feel confident that your residency has given you the expertise required to go into private practice.

The rest comes with time working in the field.

However, like many physicians, you may be underestimating your skills when it comes to patient care.

You may find it beneficial, at least at first, to be around other physicians who can help you navigate running a private practice.

This is one of the many benefits of starting your own practice in a medical coworking space – more on that later in this article.

How To Start Your Own Private Practice After Finishing Residency

If you’ve decided you want to start your own practice after finishing your residency, there are a few steps you should run through before diving in.

This is to increase your chances for success and to get ahead of as many problems as possible.

1. Start Planning Before You Finish Residency

Ideally, you should start planning as soon as you’ve decided to start your private practice, even if you haven’t graduated your residency just yet.

This will ease your transition process.

Your next goal is to make your plans as realistic as possible.

Consider the following questions:

• What does your ideal patient look like?
• How much money will you need?
• How will you market your private practice?
• How will you deal with burnout while running your private practice?
• How will you deal with dissatisfied patients?
• What do you want your work life balance to look like?

2. Learn The Skills You Need To Run A Business

The next thing you’ll need to learn are the skills required to run a business.

This is not something they teach you in medical school, so finding a mentor who can guide you on the day to day aspects of running a private practice can help.

These topics include billing and finances, insurance providers (including Medicare and Medicaid), contracts, startup costs, advisory teams, healthcare revenue cycle management, and more.

3. Choose A Location

Next you’ll want to think about your location.

At this point, you should have a good idea of what your needs are and the needs of your patients.

You should tailor your location, either in a dense urban setting or a rural environment, to the needs of your practice.

It’s also not a bad idea to research current clinics already in the neighborhood you’re considering.

You’ll want to find a missing niche in a neighborhood, and fill it to make yourself the easiest choice for potential clients.

Patient accessibility is another key concept to consider here.

You’ll want to make sure that your primary patients can reach your clinic and that it is accessible by public transit if you’re in an urban environment.

It should also have access to elevators if your clinic is not on the ground level.

Being close to a hospital can also be a benefit to your patients so that they have to travel less distances for tests and referrals.

RELATED: Top 5 Mistakes Clinicians Make When Leasing Their Practice Office Space

4. Gather A Team Of Advisors

We’ve touched on this earlier, but you’ll want to gather an interdisciplinary team of advisors who can help to guide you.

This isn’t just for the mentorship aspect – it’s to cover a wide range of nonclinical areas where your knowledge might be lacking.

Your team of advisors should include an attorney, an accountant, a financial planner, an insurance agent, a private practice digital marketing specialist, and a physician mentor.

5. Hire Support Staff

Finally, you’ll want to hire your own medical support staff.

This is to ensure your practice runs smoothly and will save you so much time in the long run.

Your team will handle the tasks of filing taxes, handling bills, finances, and insurance inquires.

But, remember to be involved and have a presence in these areas to protect your practice from mismanagement.

Why Start Your Own Private Practice In A Medical Coworking Space?

If all of the above factors seem overwhelming to you, you’re not alone.

When you decided to go to medical school, it was probably with the idea of practicing medicine in mind, not managing a business.

At the same time though, corporate healthcare can be stressful and overwhelming.

That’s where a medical coworking space comes in.

Here at Symbiosis, our medical coworking space model is designed to take care of a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the administrative side of running your private practice.

Conveniently located in downtown DC, we’ve already got an optimal location for you, and without all the hassle of having to sign a commercial lease and renovate a space.

You’ll also be working alongside a number of other healthcare providers, which provides great healthcare networking opportunities as well as a support system for you in the early days of your career.

It’ll give you greater flexibility to work the hours you want because you only have to pay for the hours you use.

And, most importantly, a medical coworking space will save you money.

This is because a new practice requires taking out a lease, purchasing equipment, and hiring administrative staff.

It’s a lot of overhead to maintain.

A medical coworking space takes care of all of these things with a monthly fee so that your patients are your number one focus.

Questions? Ask Symbiosis

At Symbiosis, we offer a medical coworking space designed to support your practice so you can focus on what you do best – practicing medicine.

We welcome medical professionals at all stages of their careers, including recent residency graduates.

Contact Symbiosis today to find out how we can help with starting your own practice today.