How will you practice?

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Blue_guitar9

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As far as family medicine is concerned, under what conditions will you usually practice? More specifically I mean...do the majority of Fop?s own there own practice or are they in a PC or do they work for a hospital. I'm assuming that most own their own practice and to me this is the only, but major, draw back. I would think owning your own practice would be allot of paper work and take the fun right out of medicine. This is the one thing preventing me from going the FP route, to me I'd rather be a doctor and leave the billing and other bologna for the administrators. So I'm certain I'm overlooking some things, and I just want clarification on what options a family doc has available to them.

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FPs can work in a group setting, in suburban/rural ERs, in urgent care clinics or in their own practices. Actually, its one of the more flexible careers in medicine.

I don't see how owning your own practice would be a huge negative- it does allow you to be your own boss (which is a big deal to me) and you can always hire an office manager and staff to take care of the admin paperwork (at least most of it). The only problem is the cost of starting a practice- I hope to gain experience in urgent care clinics or a group practice for a few years then venture off on my own once I have enough saved up.

What takes the fun out of medicine for many is not the paperwork that goes along with owning a practice, but the copious amounts of documentation required for medicare etc. that all physicans have to comply with (whether independent or employed by a hospital).
 
My theory: The class of FP's young enough to be familiar with actually innovating when it comes to information management are still in group practices where they don't have much say in how the system works. The ones with enough seniority to shake such things up don't have the expertise to do so.

Totally un-backed by any evidence, but I think in 5 years FP info management will be a lot easier, in 10 everyone will know that it is, and in you'll be able to have access to a new patient's full and standardized data from all their previous docs.

My local library is using the card catalog as scrap paper beside the computers now; the golden age of FP is yet to come!
 
the golden age of FP is yet to come!

b
Hmmm, I think your ten year estimate is pretty optomistic. Although most practices may be using an EMR by then, and each hospital may have their own systems, I predict it'll take a bit more time for everything to be nicely connected. I don't think MD's will get their collective act together so quickly on this. For example, my practice (hospital owned) has discussed getting an EMR for the past five years or more and still hasn't gotten one, it'll likely be years before they do get one and I believe we're fairly typical of hospital owned groups.
 
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