Free tools to help you manage your physician practice.

Our goal is to provide the basic tools to help you make decisions about your practice. Once you've identified problem areas you can then take steps to correct them or make an informed decision to bring in a practice consultant.

These tools are based around a 4-step process:

Benchmarking Performance. How your practice performs is objectively measured against industry norms or other benchmarks. You will usually need access to your practice's financial information, like accounts receivable, annual revenues, etc.

Benchmarking Costs. The second half of the assessment is understanding costs. Even if performance is perfect, a practice may struggle if costs are too high. Again, you will need access to cost information like salary levels and space costs.

Making Decisions. Because small practices don't usually have large resources to make sweeping changes, our recommendations focus on things that can easily be changed.

Follow-up. Each decision you take will change the dynamics of your practice. It is important to measure the effects of your decisions - come back to these tools in a month, three months and a year after making changes to see how your decisions affected performance and cost.

While we hope these tools are helpful, they provide suggestions based on imperfect equations and imperfect data. Use the recommendations as part of an integrated decision-making process - and make sure common sense is a big part of the process.

With each tool we provide links to practice management consultants who can help guide you if your practice needs professional, customized attention.