private practice fellowships

[AviatorDoc]

Random thought:

What's the advantage to a private practice to have a fellowship position? Does it make financial sense to spend time training someone else? What is expected of a fellow to "make it up" to the practice?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[SSdoc33]

I've talked a bit to some program directors about this. basically, the time that they spend teaching is time that they dont get to see more patients and bill. once you are up to speed, so to speak, then you can start making some money back for the practice. all in all, it tends to even out financially speaking. most (good) fellowship directors wont be making a significant amount of money of off the fellow. they do it because they enjoy teaching, prestige, etc. however, beware, because there certainly are fellowships out there that are looking to make a buck off of their fellows.

 

[ampaphb]

I've talked a bit to some program directors about this. basically, the time that they spend teaching is time that they dont get to see more patients and bill. once you are up to speed, so to speak, then you can start making some money back for the practice. all in all, it tends to even out financially speaking. most (good) fellowship directors wont be making a significant amount of money of off the fellow. they do it because they enjoy teaching, prestige, etc. however, beware, because there certainly are fellowships out there that are looking to make a buck off of their fellows.

Plus the cost of employing a fellow, which, between salary, malpractice insurance, and benefits, can be in excess of 100K. Now mind you, some programs wont pay you more that 30K in salary to reduce that initial outlay somewhat, so make certain you look into things like that relatively early in the process.

Programs with several fellows will also sometimes stagger their start dates (the "July fellows" and the "January fellows") - this allows the fellowship director to be less involved in the day-to-day teaching, since he can rely on his experienced fellows to teach the bread and butter mechanics to the new guys. Again, this frees the fellowship director up to be more productive even during the initial ramop-up phase of your training.

Despite the aforementioned costs, fellows are inherently profitable, assuming the fellowship has sufficient exam room space and procedure room time to accommodate the increase in volume the fellows will generate. Let's assume the practice has an ASC. Now project that the fellow brings in one additional trial stim per month, and only half go on to perm. Assuming ridiculously low revenues just to be conservative ($10k and $50k, respectively) the fellow would still generate an additional $420K in collections. Even subtracting the aforementioned $100k cost of employment, that is an additional $320k to the practice, based on ONE STIM PER MONTH. Imagine what the real numbers actually are!