Date of Award

1999

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Business Administration

Department

Business

First Advisor

Daniel W. Kemper

Second Advisor

Joseph Silverio

Third Advisor

Jan Kniffen

Abstract

This thesis is the culminating project of years of study, experience, and research focused upon a business plan to create a company which would provide physician support services not only for the physician's office but also for the physician's family.

The sudden emergence in the 1990's of several for-profit, publicly traded physician practice management companies (PPMCs) and local management services organizations (MSOs) highlighted the plight of the present physician's office as a small business overrun by regulation, managed care encroachment, financial stresses, and technological advancements. As Wall Street and Main Street eventually learned, PPMCs and MSOs were not the solutions they had originally seemed to be.

Why not? The answer has many controversial facets. One facet is clear: the JD's, MHA's, and MBA's who designed, touted, funded, and implemented these legal and financial solutions overlooked at least one crucial factor, the physician culture. In medicine, the physician is the product; s/he is the service. And, as the PPMC's and MSO's discovered, one can only at great peril disregard the physician's intrinsic interests.

But, even after the waning of the PPM C's and MSO's, which may yet learn and thus reinvent, physicians are now and still left with their overt problem of managerial support to their practices and their covert problem of personal support to their beleaguered families. DrOffice, a physician support service company designed and founded by an experienced physician executive, has some concrete, economical, physician-friendly solutions to the problems faced by modern physicians and their families. And, unlike the solutions hawked by the PPMCs and the MSOs, these DrOffice solutions can win the doctor's trust by taking into account the doctor's need for respect, time, money, simplicity, autonomy, and control.

In a nutshell and guided by its business plan, DrOffice seeks to provide managerial and advisory services to physician customers who seek to maximize their personal time, to decrease their practice and/or familial expenses, and to increase their practice revenue. Through a centralized support office for multiple local franchisees, DrOffice will help the physician achieve her/his objectives by means of professional and personal time management initiatives, practice and familial group purchasing and reengineering programs, and prepackaged, turn-key, practice add-on, revenue-generating, innovative clinical service lines/modules such as chronic care, social services, preventive medicine, occupational medicine, etc.

By way of caution, this personal-professional approach has not been tried before; and its implementation is fraught with quicksand pits along the indistinct, shifting trails cut by incessantly changing healthcare industry regulation, technology, reimbursement. With strategic vision, physician leadership, perseverance, frugality, faith , hope, and charity, DrOffice will follow and, as necessary, amend its living, changing, flexible business plan in order to cut new trails in an endless quest to continually create and multiply the ideal physician's office: "DrOffice, the Way a Doctor's Office Should Be."

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