The Independent Practice Isn’t Broken. The Model Around It Is. 

Independent physicians are often told some version of the same story: healthcare has become too complicated, too expensive and too competitive to make it on your own.

There is some truth in that. Running an independent medical practice is harder than it used to be.

But that doesn’t mean independent practice is the problem.

The business of practicing medicine has changed

Most physicians built their practices to care for patients, build strong clinical teams and practice medicine the way they believed it should be practiced.

Today, doing that also means managing an increasingly complex business.

Payer requirements change. Prior authorizations consume time. Recruiting and retaining staff gets harder. Credentialing delays can keep a new provider from seeing patients. Technology requires continual investment. Compliance requirements grow. Reimbursement pressure continues.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, physicians are still expected to see patients, lead their teams and grow their practices.

Large healthcare organizations have entire departments dedicated to many of these functions. An independent practice may be trying to solve the same problems with a practice manager, a handful of outside vendors and a physician owner who is already working a full day.

That isn’t a failure of independent medicine.

It’s a problem of scale.

Independence still has real value

The answer might seem obvious: join a larger organization and let someone else handle it.

For some physicians, that may be the right choice.

But there is a reason so many independent physicians hesitate.

They have spent years, sometimes decades, building practices around how they believe medicine should be practiced. They know their patients. They know their communities. They have built teams and cultures that reflect their values.

They want support. They want better infrastructure. They want more negotiating leverage and fewer administrative headaches.

What they don’t necessarily want is to give up control of the practice they built in order to get it.

And they shouldn’t have to.

What if the choice isn’t independence or scale?

For too long, physicians have been presented with a binary choice.

Stay independent and continue carrying the operational burden yourself.

Or join a larger organization and accept that greater resources may come with less control.

There is a third way.

Independent practices can gain access to the infrastructure and scale of a larger organization while preserving the things that made independence worth protecting in the first place.

That means bringing enterprise-level capabilities to the practice in areas such as revenue cycle management, payer contracting, credentialing, compliance, human resources, technology, analytics and growth.

The goal isn’t to take the practice away from the physician.

It’s to take more of the business burden away from the physician.

Build around the physician, not over them

At One Health Partners, we believe the future of independent medicine isn’t about asking physicians to do more with less.

It’s about building better support around them.

Our model gives specialty practices access to the infrastructure, expertise and scale of a larger healthcare organization while keeping physicians at the center of the practice they built.

Because the best solution to the challenges facing independent medicine isn’t eliminating independent medicine.

It’s giving independent physicians a better way to compete.

‍You built a practice worth protecting. We built One Health Partners to help you keep building it.

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