Purchasing an electronic medical record

Leasing office space

9/27/09 -- Leasing the space that will eventually become the practice location has been the most complex and laborious procedure thus far. This is due to a combination of factors including finding a medical real estate agent (yes, they can be found!), negotiating rental prices for the space, and designing the "buildout" or renovations that need to be done prior to a new doctor entering the space. The design part has been the most encouraging, with the ability for us to envision how the new office will ultimately appear. Although we plan to sign our lease during the coming week, this whole process has taken two months to accomplish.

Malpractice insurance

9/27/09 -- A lot of activity is now underway to open the practice on time by December 1st. We've received a malpractice insurance policy from Medical Protective for the first year of patient care. Even this seemingly simple act took over a month to accomplish, requiring time for searching for companies, researching possible price quotes, and agreeing finally on a single insurance company to sell the policy. It seems like emailing works well, but we discovered that often there are several levels of management in the companies which add weeks to waiting for price quotes and underwriting to be done. Even after the agreement to purchase, it seems to take a week in general to generate a policy number. Much different from simply buying auto or home insurance.

Licenses

9/10/09 -- Dr. West has now obtained his DC medical practitioners and controlled substances licenses. We were very impressed by the complexity of doing business by mail with the DC Health Professional Licensing system. However, we found that actually traveling to the office was the best way to get things accomplished quickly in the end. They can even print out licenses on the spot once all the essential component documents are received.

Rehabilitation of the office

9/9/09 -- Selections are made for the building materials that will be included in the rehabilitation of the new office. We sat for 3 hours today doing nothing but picking color swatches, rug samples, flooring materials, counter tops, and cabinets. WOW! There are a lot of choices to be made in a short amount of time. However, Joy (the architect assigned to our office) was patient, friendly, and very helpful. She made the time go by quickly. We choose to go with a professional blue theme to the office with a blue-flecked granite for the counter tops, hardwood flooring for the waiting area and hall way, and wood veneer for the cabinets. We even chose a paint color for accent walls in the patient rooms. Things are slowing coming together.

A new web site is born

8/25/09 -- Our clinic's web site goes live for the first time. Building a web site that is contemporary, professional, and yet functional has taken some time. We used the site Homestead to help us build and launch the site. There is nothing particularly special about Homestead, but it had a lot of opportunities to choose from -- which also gave us many hours of work. We hope that our future patients will like the contemporary art pieces we found and added to the new web site.

We select a site

8/13/09 -- Finding a realtor who dealt specifically in medical office space took quite a time to find. We eventually drove to downtown Washington, DC, and began taking name and phone numbers off of the sides of the buildings. We eventually found G-Z Realty and Nick Zuppas who turned out to be a lot of help. We looked at many sites and finally chose one at 2440 M Street on the fourth floor. We really liked the windows in this office suite and the space size. This space will hopefully be something we can grow into as the medical practice develops. The site will need some cosmetic rehabilitation (also known as a "buildout"), but other than that it looks good to go!

Lining up funding

8/21/09 -- Our clinic has been approved for a small business loan through Bank of America. We are one step closer to the opening!

A name is chosen

8/3/09 -- Our clinic gets a new name: The Washington Endocrine Clinic. We needed a name to put in the business plan we were writing. We spent quite a bit of time thinking through this exercise of creating a name. We hopefully chose a name that we can grow with into the future and yet local enough to reflect the city where we chose to open the clinic.

Incorporation

8/6/09 -- Our clinic is incorporated as a PLLC in Washington DC. We sat and stood in long lines down at the Department of Consumer & Regulatory Affairs in Washington DC today. Things moved slowly, but we eventually made our way through the maze of offices we needed to visit. It was a hot day -- thank goodness we were inside!

Writing a business plan

7/27/09 -- A business plan is developed and written for the clinic.

We began our journey by reading the very helpful book, "Start Your Own Medical Practice, What They Don't Teach You in Medical School," written by Huss and Coleman. What seemed liked a daunting task at first was made much easier through the initial help of this book. We bought a software to write the business plan over the internet. This included several templates, one of which was for a medical office. The business plan was quite detailed and made us think through many different aspects of the practice from start-up costs, to marketing, to monthly financial statements.