Physician medical office investment: optimize your office’s size, layout, and location to increase patient capacity, slash inefficiencies, and skyrocket practice profitability.
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Most physicians have one critically important asset in their investment portfolio that significantly impacts the amount of income they earn every year. They "invest" in this asset with a check monthly for as long as they continue to practice medicine yet it is one of the least understood assets in the physician's portfolio. What is it?
The answer, of course, is your medical office. Let me explain; your office represents one thing...a center of production. Just like a manufacturing plant, you produce income by seeing and treating patients in your "plant" and your income is directly tied to your production. You invest in your "plant" every month with your rent check or mortgage payment. Your "investment" provides you with the location, parking, services, signage, and physical space for the diagnosis and treatment of patients. All of these items will critically affect the "Return on your rent or mortgage investment dollar".
Let us take a simple example: your office could use one more exam room to run efficiently. Utilizing this exam room with your current daily patient load, you could see six additional patients per day. If we assume an average charge of $150 per patient, per 250 working days, you will have lost $225,000 in revenue one year.
This is just one example of how your office space affect your income. All too often, physicians will focus too much attention on the additional cost to rent or purchase when these factors are not nearly as important considerations in choosing your office. In the example above, let's assume this space was chosen because the annual rent was $44,000 per year and a larger space cost $54,000 per year. Selecting the smaller office and not fully utilizing resources hasn’t saved $10,000 per year – it has cost you $215,000 ($225,000 - $10,000). The losses become even more staggering when you factor in lost income and increased costs due to an inefficiently designed office where you need more employees to produce the work.
Here are some simple rules to follow in order to maximize the value of your office investment.
You can determine whether you are losing income due to your office layout and/or its location by answering these questions:
A “yes” answer to any of these questions indicates you may be losing income opportunities. In many cases, you can construct a simple cost/benefit analysis to determine the impact of possible office changes to your income. For a more in-depth analysis, you may be better served by hiring an expert to assist you in evaluating your options.
In summary, your office represents a significant "practice" investment. It is a tool that you use to complete your production cycle. By recognizing this fact, you are better able to evaluate and plan for the future growth of your practice and the services and procedures you will employ to enhance the return on your monthly investment. Oftentimes we read about corporations that abandon huge manufacturing plants worth hundreds of millions of dollars and are amazed at the perceived waste. However, these firms have determined that the sunk cost of remaining in a particular location was overshadowed by the opportunities to maximize their return on investment elsewhere. In today's healthcare marketplace of declining reimbursement and competition, you too should critically evaluate opportunities to maximize the return on your office investment dollar.
Frank Ricci has over 30 years experience in real estate development, brokerage, facility design, and construction management of medical office buildings, surgery centers, diagnostic centers and other healthcare facilities.
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