Common, especially if you're OK with making 180K. What people don't appreciate is how challenging and time consuming it is to actually build a successful private practice after you graduate, even within a larger group. My older brother is doing it now - you have to make yourself known to referring physicians, which involves a ton of time-consuming phone calls/meetings/constant availability to see their patients on short notice. On top of this, you take call frequently in order to fulfill your contractual obligations and "bring" new patients into your practice. Finally, your senior partners will scoop up all of the self-pay/PPO insurance patients, and try and leave you with the rest. After your first/second year guarantee is up, you eat what you kill. So is it possible to work 7:30-5/6 and have your clinic full of operative patients with good insurance and be really efficient and earn near the MGMA mean? Yeah but it takes so many years after residency to actually create the infrastructure to allow this to happen.
I'm an ortho staff in the midwest.
Agree with most of the above. That being said, if for some odd reason you really only wanted to work 730-5....sure, you can also just work 9-12...you just won't make much income, and green is right, it'll be hard to establish yourself if you start off slow.
what most of us do is -- out of fellowship, we're young, eager, want to operate -- so we take call, go visit family gp's, cover high school/college athletics etc to build our practice volume. As you get older, maybe in your 50's (for some earlier), you may slow. down, cover fewer community sports games, take less call...let the younger guys do that, you'll probably have an established private payer base, you'll make a bit less, but be happy doing so.
I don't know that your senior partners will poach all the ppo/consults....that may happen in some groups, maybe in ones in a big city where there is lots of competition - its likely the senior partners are established and most people in town will them private insurance consults as they know them. By taking call/ortho walk in, assuming you're in a city/town with decent payor mix and not an oversupply of orthopedic surgeons, you should get the private payers too.
yea, if you want to be in a big metro - new york, chicago, LA, etc -- then expect lots of competition. Unfortunately, medicine. simply isn't very lucrative in big cities unless you're neal elattrache, or anthony romeo and you've got device patents with passive income coming in or you're with a very powerful group that covers pro-sports teams. so all the private. insurance population wants to see you. For those privately covered people -- you'll definitely have to hustle harder in LA. just to make an average (barely) income than you would in a smaller city in the midwest or the south.
The honest truth is...once you're out, you probably won't want to do just 7-530 ortho because you won't be able to sustain your lifestyle....you may d o 7-530 ortho once you're 45/50 and accept an income trade off.
