Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Solo doctor without a secretary?

I'm now sharing a secretary with a non-physician. She is moving and the two of us are trying to figure out what to do. I have a part-time cash only, consulting-type practice and would like to save on the cost of a secretary. Wouldn't it be great if information technology could allow a doctor to do everything him/herself without needing to pay another person?

Does anyone out there practice without a secretary? Does it work? How do you make it work? I already have an informative website and use e-mail extensively in my practice. I could make more use of those two tools. I'm also thinking about using some of the interfaces for AC--like Appointment Quest, Instant Medical History, and UpDox. Are those interfaces very useful for reducing secretarial work?

I'd also need a sophisticated branching phone answering system that would tell most folks what to do and leave only a few callers that I would actually need to call back.

Henry

Hi Henry I am a cash only FM practice, it is sjust me and my receptionist. I can tell you from working these past two weeks with her out 75% of the time it was a bit crazy trying to anser the phones etc. We interface with labcorp. Having her to upload consult notes answer the phone and check folks in and out is a must for me. I too have a website that is very informative and use email a great deal. Good luck and keep me posted.

You can run a practice by yourself, but it comes down to a value of time and money. It makes more sense to pay for a part time secretary and you can focus on more medicine related items.
It is hard to answer phone calls, schedule appointments, open junk and non junk mail, scan info if you are paperless, file it if you remain with paper, and see patient and return phone calls.

If you are not that busy, it may work, but if the volume picks up, you need help.

Although a sophisticated branching phone system may work for administrative things, a lot of patients call with clinical questions and often want to know "do I need to be seen?" Some simple ones can be branched, most will require a voice connection. Patients also prefer to speak to a live body and you are more likely to lose them if they feel they are only connected to a machine.

Hi Henry
You have what is known lately as a micropractice.
You may found interesting an article published in Medical Economic Magazine in 2006 about how some doctos have done it.
The web site is memag.com (part of Modern Medicine) If you haven't, you will need to register. It is free. Then just search the word micropractice.
There are many ways on how to set such a practice. I will depend mainly on your budget; however, you must definately will need to rely a lot on technology to make it easier to handle.
If I were to start such a practice today I will have a small office with small reception area and maybe one or two exam rooms
One Receptionist/MA during business hours. It will be necesary to be a female MA since I will need to be chapperoned for some exams for female patients. For this last particular reason, I will avoid not have a least one female MA.
One Desktop PC in the reception area where my AC main database will reside.
One laptop wirely connected to the Desktop while in the office.
Out side the office, I will connect to the desktop via logmein and will I prob. use the Verizon Wireless Mobile Broadband adapter to be able to get connected from almost anywhere.
For Phone services I will explore Onebox Virtual Phone system
and I will have One Networkable Printer/Fax/Scanner.
This are Just a few Ideas. Here in this great forum, I am sure you will find more and more ideas on how to set the Micropractice of your dreams. Good Luck!!!

Thanks for the ideas. I hadn't heard of "micropractice" or read anything about it. My practice is probably just about as ideal as they come for the micropractice concept as I don't do primary care, take cash only, have long appointments, and don't have emergencies.

One Box looks very useful indeed to help control incoming calls and minimize those that I have to answer--and allow me to answer them anyhwere and in anyway I want. Getting faxes and voicemail sent to my e-mail would help too.

What I'd really need is a real-time online patient scheduling system that is integrated with AC--and even better one that patients could also access by phone! Maybe a web-based appointment program already has this feature but I haven't seen one yet. Patients could call in to an appointment. no. and put in code for my practice, choose and time frame and receive a number of openings from which to choose. Now that would be cool! Actually AC could probably do this with a modem connection to the main AC database computer. Patients could just select the option from my main number. It would just take some additional software and voice recognition plus a text-to-voice translator. Lots of big companies have these kinds of voice-based systems to direct calls and provide services.

Henry

The other information on solo doc without staff can be found by searching on google.com for IDEAL MEDICAL PRACTICE. This is a fairly active group of providers who are striving for practices like this. They actually have a Yahoo listserve that is very active.

Take a look. Personally I don't want to answer the phone as much as my front desk person does......to each his/her own.