12/5/09 Clinic Opening

Well, we've been busy this week with the opening of the clinic on December 1st. We were proud that our business plan went according to schedule and we currently have patients scheduled for most of the days in this coming week. On December 7th, we will see the first patients at The Washington Endocrine Clinic, PLLC. We are now accepting Medicare, Cigna and Carefirst Blue Cross/Blue Shield. We are eagerly awaiting the approval of contracts with Aetna, United, Unicare, Health Link, and Tricare. We encourage patients with other plans to call our office to discuss how we can provide Endocrinology services.

Medical equipment, insurance credentialing, and marketing

10/11/09 -- The lease is now signed, and we are preparing to hit the ground running by December. In order to make this happen, we will need to obtain medical equipment for the new practice, accomplish credentialing with various insurance companies and market efficiently to make the clinic known to the general public and referring physicians. For our medical equipment, we surveyed several online companies which market themselves as medical equipment companies. We identified one that had nearly all of the items we were interested in purchasing and is a company that also offers an installment plan for payments in order to help contain up-front costs. Insurance credentialing can take several months depending on the company, but we have now contacted Aetna, Carefirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, Coventry, United, Humana and Medicare and submitted applications. This process requires that an online CAQH (Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare) Universal Provider Datasource application be submitted, from which the individual insurance companies can download data. This online application was completed several weeks ago, but the process of obtaining all necessary information took approximately 2 months. We are now waiting to hear back from insurance companies and will need to call frequently to verify that the application materials are all received and in processing. Marketing has already begun by word of mouth and using our clinic website. However, we will need to reach local referring physicians in the surrounding community and this will require knowledge of who these physicians are. A useful publication is "The Washington Physicians Directory". This thick paperback book contains names and addresses of local physicians in the Washington Metropolitan area and allows one to order address labels by region, zipcode and specialty, which will save us valuable time. We have also chosen to design and mail attractive postcards in lieu of more expensive pamphlets and envelopes in order to have the greatest efficiency in mail advertising. The postcards can be designed affordably yet creatively using Vistaprint.com.

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.