It feels dangerous to write this, but…my practice seems to be working.
I am now running and hiding from lightning bolts, meteors, or stray arrows shot in the air by a Scottish soldier. I am also expecting a raid on my office by the IRS, CDC, and BBC tomorrow morning. I don’t know why I wrote that.
But as afraid as I am to admit it, the thing that was once just a good idea is now actually growing and improving. We are up to about 300 patients (with a big infusion when a local TV network did a story on my practice) and have enough money to pay bills without a visit from uncle bouncy. While we’ve started to discuss when we will hire another staff person (probably a nurse), neither me nor my nurse Jamie (may her name be ever blessed) feel overwhelmed at this point. We can handle this volume, which speaks well for the future when we actually have a fully-working system.
The past few weeks have been totally consumed by my need to have an underlying system of organization. After fighting valiantly against the idea for the first two months, I succumbed to the necessity of building my own IT system and have been seeing the many benefits of that decision. Despite being totally obsessed with how data tables connect and whether I’ve left a parenthesis off of a script I’ve written, I now have a place to put data, have a pretty decent task management system, have an integrated address book, and have discussed integration with my phone system vendor, my secure messaging developer, and a lab order/result integration vendor. I’ve also found some strong local tech talent who gets what I am doing and yet doesn’t simply see the market potential for my software.
The reality is, my whole focus is on the practice model, and that model seems to work. As my business and medical care management systems click into place and become more functional, growing the practice should not be a problem. We continue to get several new patients signing up every day, and now the reluctant spouses of establish patients are joining (which is a very good sign – for both my practice and for their marriages).
Let me appease the gods and state clearly that this is by no means a sure thing. There are many, many things that could go wrong. A successful start-up requires not only a good idea and hard work; it also needs requires luck (or at least to avoid bad luck). I could get cancer, my building could burn down, or our city could be overrun by a mob of psychotic llamas. We all know the llama apocalypse is happening; it’s just a question of when, not if. So I accept the fact that I am, to a great extent, in the hands of the fates (and llamas).
