[2006alum]

My wife and I have been talking about this and what it means for her solo medical practice. She is doing telemedicine now but that won't come close to paying rent and payroll. All the banks are giving her the run around on SBA loans, even the one she regularly banks with. Her expenses will definitely rise because she will need a lot more PPE than she typically uses, and that will be difficult if not impossible to stock in short term and plain expensive in long term.

She will probably have to leave her current setup and restart doing telemedicine from home, acting as her own secretary, and leasing clinic space one day a week, because hard to imagine in the after time she will have a clinic schedule full of people wanting to come in.

Unclear if even this would make any money but it would at least lose a lot less than the current situation.

Sorry to hear that. Hopefully she can weather the tide until things begin to resume. I would imagine most medical procedures will simply be deferred rather than reconsidered altogether, so hopefully she just has to ride things out?

Her experience reminded me of a related anecdote about a similar situation with a close friend who's a solo-practice orthodontist. She has had to lay off her entire staff, but she has continued to do emergency procedures, which means she has had to do all the prep, clean up, insurance billing, etc., herself, whereas before she had her employees do it. When she went to do the most recent round of insurance billing, she found $40,000 worth of claims that her employees had improperly entered and that had been kicked back and rejected. And the employees didn't bother to fix them, so they just sat there! 

As a result, she has resolved that even when things go back to normal, given the likely reduced demand in a least the short to medium term, she will either do the billing herself or else have her part-time stay-at-home partner do it. That's one more job that isn't coming back.

[2006alum]

My wife and I have been talking about this and what it means for her solo medical practice. She is doing telemedicine now but that won't come close to paying rent and payroll. All the banks are giving her the run around on SBA loans, even the one she regularly banks with. Her expenses will definitely rise because she will need a lot more PPE than she typically uses, and that will be difficult if not impossible to stock in short term and plain expensive in long term.

She will probably have to leave her current setup and restart doing telemedicine from home, acting as her own secretary, and leasing clinic space one day a week, because hard to imagine in the after time she will have a clinic schedule full of people wanting to come in.

Unclear if even this would make any money but it would at least lose a lot less than the current situation.

Sorry to hear that. Hopefully she can weather the tide until things begin to resume. I would imagine most medical procedures will simply be deferred rather than reconsidered altogether, so hopefully she just has to ride things out?

Her experience reminded me of a related anecdote about a similar situation with a close friend who's a solo-practice orthodontist. She has had to lay off her entire staff, but she has continued to do emergency procedures, which means she has had to do all the prep, clean up, insurance billing, etc., herself, whereas before she had her employees do it. When she went to do the most recent round of insurance billing, she found $40,000 worth of claims that her employees had improperly entered and that had been kicked back and rejected. And the employees didn't bother to fix them, so they just sat there! 

As a result, she has resolved that even when things go back to normal, given the likely reduced demand in a least the short to medium term, she will either do the billing herself or else have her part-time stay-at-home partner do it. That's one more job that isn't coming back.