Heck. If I had a psychiatrist I knew who needed patients, I could make you rich in 6 months. You probably would only need to visit 2-3 FP's in your area to have a good panel started. Be sure you let your closest urgent care folks know that you need patients. They have the largest volume.
Not true.
I'm a psychiatrist.
Was in a large metro for a few years. Big Box shops only clicked the Epic button refer to psych, their own internal, which was never fully staffed and patients would wait 6-12 months. The referral department wouldn't send out.
That only left the private practice FM/IM groups. Some were more cash heavy, and simply kept the patients themselves. Others were heavy medicaid/medicare clinics - and simply put, everything in Psychiatry is different, and medicare/medicaid in a small solo practice for psychiatry can be a biz killer. They take up too much time, too little pay to keep the office running, even with our lower overhead. So not taking medi/medi, drastically limits patient panel.
Then you have the ARNP Army and in my former location was saturated and led to stiff competition for the private insurance population.
Now when I was there, Cigna, UHC were a notable chunk of the market, and they paid less than medicare to psychiatry. I knew of other private practice non psychiatry specialists, and they were getting much better rates - but not psychiatry.
Moved to a rural BFE place, many of my patients dropped me, despite covid era telemedicine indoctrination, level of response/access/care didn't change. But psychologically they wanted someone closer. I slowly lost 2/3 of patients. Reaching out to the very few IM/FM in local area, they are so used to limited specialists and being the FM who does it all, they just don't refer. So things are slow going here, despite my ability to get people in within 1-2 weeks. More than 1/2 of my patients come by their own devices of reaching out and googling themselves or their PCP saying going find a psychiatrist. Despite having had referrals from that doc in the past, so they know I'm around.
Now if I were at an employed health/hospital job? I would have already been full, but that would have been with the full spectrum of psychiatry and medicare/medicaid severity - but life would have been hell without an actual department and support staff. Than if you do get the right support staff to manage the patient acuity appropriately, your run the risk at a small place (or even big places) running a loss budget, and now you are at the mercy of the admin rotations... next new admin will line item zoom in and cut. Then you're burned out and looking for greener pastures.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
And then, if you happen to be a psychiatrist who doesn't allow cannabis with stimulants, or actually tell people they don't have ADHD, or have people get OSA worked up first before ADHD, or taper/stop benzos, you will be hated by patients and a targeted for negative google reviews.
So everything isn't peachy over in Psychiatry land.
