How To Optimize & Scale Your Psychiatry Private Practice in 2024

In this blog I share how to define success in your private psychiatry practice and optimize it for lasting growth. Learn why working smarter, not harder, is the key to true success and learn the crucial steps to measure your practice’s efficiency, from auditing admin tasks to evaluating your patient panel. I also share the strategies to streamline your workload and focus on what matters most – working with your DREAM patients. Are you ready to make more while working less?

How do you currently measure “success” in your private practice? Is it the number of patients you have, how many hours you work, or how much you charge?

While there are numerous ways you could measure success (and your version of success might be different than mine), there is one common denominator among everyone that reached their own version of success in private practice – they work smarter, not harder. 

What does this mean, exactly?

Let’s say your practice is full. You’re working on your own schedule, charging what is considered “high” rates and seeing patients within your niche. By traditional measures, you’ve reached success.

But what people don’t know is that you…

• Work 50-60+ hour weeks
• Never go on vacation
• Feel like you are still somehow behind on a million business and admin tasks (even though you spend hours on them every day)

You’re spending your precious time on things like documentation, managing scheduling, handling prescription requests, responding to emails and phone calls, reviewing intake forms, filing taxes, etc.

Basically, you’re STILL doing everything that you wanted to do less of when you left your insurance-based job in the first place and started your own private practice.

But here’s the thing: you didn’t go into private practice to waste your time on meticulous, low-value, admin tasks – you did it to have more time doing what you love, which is helping patients and changing their lives!

In the world of owning a private practice, where you must sustain the delicate balance of caring for your patients and running a business at the same time, you might find yourself knee-deep in the day-to-day grind. It can be easy to get lost in the shuffle of patient appointments, notes, and the other nitty-gritty details. But here’s the thing – spending all your time ‘inside’ your business might mean you’re missing the forest for the trees. 

So how do you optimize your private practice to spend LESS time on low-value work, and MORE time on activities that are rewarding and lucrative?

How do you scale your practice to bring in your dream patients?

Before we dive into private practice optimization strategies, you need to have a specific understanding of where you’re spending your time, your true hourly rate, and where your revenue is coming from.

Get ready to roll up your sleeves and pinpoint the gaps and opportunities in your private practice.

Let’s get into it.

Complete a Private Practice Audit 

If you’re charging high fees but still feel like you’re not making a lot of money for the amount of work that you do, it’s time to figure out where the holes are in your business. 

If you’re working harder than you think you should be, or if everything just feels cumbersome and difficult (and you don’t understand why it’s so difficult), then you need to take a pause and do a practice audit. 

While it’s crucial to be hands-on, drowning in the minutiae can make you miss the strategic moves that have the potential to take your practice to the next level. It’s like being so busy fixing individual puzzle pieces that you forget to step back and see the whole picture. 

That’s why completing a private practice audit is the first step you need to take to optimize your private practice. 

Waiting until your practice hits the 12-month mark gives you a solid data foundation – the kind you need to see patterns, strengths, and spots that could be optimized. They say what’s measured gets managed, so I’m going to show you how to do just that.

Before diving into strategic decisions and pivots, it’s essential to complete audits in two key areas of your business: admin time and your patient panel. 

Step 1: Audit Your Time Spent on Admin Tasks 

An admin audit can help you figure out exactly which admin tasks are taking up most of your time, so that you can come up with solutions for optimizing those areas in your practice.

For one solid week, keep track of all the requests you receive from your patients in-between appointments and record the details of each request in a spreadsheet. Be sure to note how they contacted you, what their request was, and what you did to resolve the request.

After one week of tracking the requests, go back to the spreadsheet and figure out which requests tend to come up the most and take up most of your time. Then write down potential solutions and ideas for how you can streamline those requests in the future.

For example, if you noticed that you get a lot of scheduling requests, consider automating this task by creating an auto-scheduling widget in your EHR for patients to book their appointments without your involvement.

Your admin audit will reveal a lot about where your time is being spent in the business, and make it clear where you need to eliminate, automate, or potentially delegate those admin tasks (the last resort).

Step 2: Audit Your Patient Panel

The next step is to audit your patient panel. Why is this important? Because it will help you objectively pinpoint the type of patients that you want to keep (and continue attracting) to your practice, and those who no longer fit your practice mold. 

This part of the audit is likely to take you the most time to complete, but is a crucial step of the optimization process. 

Export your patient list from your EHR system into a spreadsheet (you only need their names). Then in columns include the following information: 

1. Patient’s hourly rate 
2. Patient’s year-to-date revenue (meaning how much did you make from that patient in a 12-month period)
3. Patient’s revenue potential (based on how often you expect to see this patient)
4. Patient’s boundary respect rating (based on any past interactions)
5. Patient’s history/stability rating (based on patient’s conditions) 
6. Patient’s ancillary work rating (meaning how much additional work is required in between appointments)

The Private Practice Audit Spreadsheet

If you’re starting to feel overwhelmed, or think “I’m not a spreadsheet person…” luckily for you, I created a templated spreadsheet to make auditing your patient panel and admin time much easier and straightforward.

It’s called “The Private Practice Audit” and will help you accurately track different data points of your practice, recognize gaps and opportunities, and make a game plan to streamline and optimize your private practice. Simply put, auditing your private practice will help you recognize how to make more while working less. 

You can access the audit inside of my free community, Dream Practice School.

Once you join Dream Practice School you’ll have immediate access to The Private Practice Audit, which also includes a guided video on how to:

1. Audit your patient panel, create a rating system, and implement a plan of action based on the results
2. Calculate your revenue per hour
3. Track, audit, and create solutions to eliminate admin tasks

Enter your email below to get your exclusive invitation and access the Private Practice Audit:

Optimize Your Practice Based on Audit Findings 

Now that we’ve shed light on why auditing is key to a thriving private practice, let’s dive into the fun part – optimization. Picture this as the moment you switch from autopilot to manual control, fine-tuning your practice for maximum efficiency and impact.

1. Streamline Your Admin Work 

There are 3 ways to optimize business systems in a private practice – eliminate, automate, and delegate. To audit your admin tasks, figure out what tasks take up the most time in your day and solve for them by following these steps:

1. Eliminate – Does the task even need to be done?
2. Automate – Can you use a software solution to automate the process?
3. Delegate – Can you hire someone to do this for you?

For example, can you eliminate your after hours phone line, automate your billing via an EHR software like IntakeQ, or/and delegate making new patient charts to an assistant?

The key to doing this right is to implement these in order. Don’t delegate what you can automate, and don’t automate what you can eliminate!

In fact, a common mistake that I often see psychiatrists make when trying to optimize their private practice is jumping straight to hiring an assistant or receptionist to do their admin tasks for them.

The truth is, you don’t need to pay someone else to do a task that might not even need to be done, or can be done for cheap with a software solution. Besides, there is a huge learning curve with hiring and training an employee, which is why it should always be the last step in your optimization process.

2. Phase out patients who aren’t aligned with your practice

Once you complete your patient panel audit you’ll be able to see your practice at a 30,000 foot view, and identify the patients who are no longer a good fit for your practice. 

For example, you may have patients from when you first started building your practice that are not truly aligned with your practice. Now is the time to re-evaluate your patient panel for your long-term goals, and phase out the patients that don’t fit within that mold.

Now would also be the time to phase out any insurance patients that are left in your practice if your end goal is to have a cash-pay private practice.

What’s the best way to do this?

My advice is to give your patients a letter 2-3 months in advance and include the following:

• State that in order to provide better care for your patients, you will stop accepting insurance and will be a cash only provider.
• Include any additional offerings that you will add to your private practice, such as psychotherapy, nutraceuticals, comprehensive lab testing, etc.
• Speak to your patients’ concerns and offer a time-limited sliding scale to incentivize them to stay in your practice.
• Appeal to your patients’ sense of fairness and explain that you need to get out of the insurance system in order to provide your highest level of care. It’s very likely that they will understand and would rather pay you directly than throw money at some unknown large organization. 

By the way, I also have a templated letter for this (and many other scenarios) that I share with my mentees in Dream Practice Academy.

3. Raise your fees

Now this next step might give you a little bit of anxiety… but bear with me.

Do you know what the difference is between a $300/hr psychiatrist and a $1,000/hr psychiatrist? I’ll tell you what it’s not: clinical skills.

I know what you’re thinking:

“I need more experience before I increase my fees.”

“I’ll be under too much pressure if I increase my fees.”

“I’m not ready yet.”

A common misconception psychiatric providers have is that they think they need more clinical skills, experience, or training before they can increase their fees. 

The truth is, at a certain point it is not your clinical skills that become the limiting factor for raising your fees. So to answer the question, it’s the way you position your clinical skills into specific services that makes the difference between a $300/hr psychiatrist and a $1,000/hr psychiatrist.

While raising your fees is usually thought of solely as a way to make more money, it also acts as an important barrier to entry into your practice. Having higher fees can ensure that the patients that do come into your practice are much more aligned with your treatment philosophy and will be more invested in the treatment process.

How To Raise Your Fees With Existing Patients

There are two main ways you can move up the value chain and raise your fees:

1) Add new services and features to your practice

2) Take the services you already provide and reposition them to be more appealing

Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself and get creative with ways that you can increase the value you provide to your patients, because that’s exactly how you get to the point of charging high fees that other people think are insane. 

And guess what? If you figure out how to position yourself in a way that your patients find extremely valuable, they will be happy to pay those fees because they know that the value you provide them with is worth more than what you charge.

4. Optimize your marketing strategies to bring in MORE dream patients 

Now that you know who the patients are who ranked high in your practice audit, you can optimize your marketing to attract more patients just like them.

For example, where did they hear about you? What are the common demographic and psychographic factors they have in common? How can you pivot your messaging to speak more directly and clearer to them? What other providers do they see, and are you connected to them for potential referrals? What terms did they search on Google to find you? 

While it might seem tempting to have a more generalized niche and to treat a wide variety of patients, the benefit of niching down is that you can position yourself an expert to a particular group of patients.

Instead of marketing yourself as a psychiatrists who can treat all, you market yourself as THE go-to psychiatrist for your niche. For example,

• THE go-to psychiatrist for high-functioning CEOs, lawyers, and entrepreneurs with ADHD
• THE go-to psychiatrist for healthcare workers struggling with burnout
• THE go-to psychiatrist for women struggling with hormonally-related mood conditions

This could also mean introducing more advanced marketing strategies, like running a Google Ads Campaign, launching a blog strategy, building a YouTube channel, or dipping your toes into the world of social media marketing. 

Take Your Practice To The Next Level in 2024

I know running a psychiatry private practice can feel overwhelming when you don’t have any guidance on what’s “next”.

What happens when you reach the point where you have no more time to give, but aren’t satisfied with the amount of money you make? Or feel like your time isn’t being optimized? How do you get to the next level to have a better work-life balance and spend more time doing things you love outside of work?

I work with several psychiatrists who come to me with an already established practice, but need help making decisions to streamline, pivot, and transition their practices into a more balanced, better functioning business.

If you’re in that position now and are looking for additional guidance on your private practice journey, I invite you to join Dream Practice School. This program is exclusive for psychiatric providers who are interested in private practice and integrative psychiatry. We currently have 2k+ providers enrolled (and growing daily)!

Even if it seems like your practice is in a good place, I still encourage you to go and complete the Private Practice Audit – you might be surprised by what you find.

You can also follow me on Instagram @thepsychiatrymentor, and on YouTube The Psychiatry Mentor for more valuable private practice and integrative psychiatry tips and resources. 

I hope to connect with you soon.