Practice Management

Missed claims filing deadlines threaten patient care

Finance

May 13, 2026

I used to think health care finance was mostly about numbers. Then I worked inside the financial operations of a health care organization and realized how much patient care depends on systems most people never see. One experience has stayed with me ever since.

A claim for care that had already been provided was sitting in a billing backlog, approaching the payer’s filing deadline. The treatment had been completed. The staff …

Accounts receivable days hide four billing problems

GetPracticeHelp

Finance

May 11, 2026

A cash symptom can have several causes

A practice owner notices the same warning signs: collections are lower than expected, the bank balance feels tighter, and the billing report shows money still sitting unpaid. The first conclusion is usually simple. Billing is the problem.

Sometimes that is true. More often, the word “billing” is covering several different problems that require different fixes. A slow front desk, a coding issue, payer delays, denial …

How to navigate physician job loss in the first week

Patrick Hudson, MD

Physician

May 11, 2026

A generation ago, most physicians barely considered the possibility of suddenly losing a job.

The profession was not perfectly stable, of course. Doctors still burned out, practices failed, partnerships fractured, and hospitals behaved badly from time to time. But for many physicians there remained an underlying assumption that competence and hard work created a reasonably durable professional life. If you trained well, treated patients properly, maintained your reputation, and kept your …

5 questions to ask before you choose a credentialing service

GetPracticeHelp

Finance

May 7, 2026

Credentialing mistakes are expensive before they are visible

Credentialing problems usually look administrative until the revenue gap appears. A new practice may be open, staffed, leased, insured, and ready for patients, but one missing payer panel can cut off a revenue stream for a quarter or more.

The timeline is not small. Payer enrollment commonly takes 90 to 180 days. For a practice carrying rent, software, payroll, malpractice coverage, phones, internet, marketing, …

Why your doctor invests like a vaccine skeptic

Hernan Moscoso Boedo, PhD

Finance

May 3, 2026

Consider a pediatrician and his wife, a cardiologist. Together they earn over $700,000 per year. They have $200,000 sitting in a savings account earning 4 percent. They own a $750,000 house and lease a luxury sedan. They pay a financial advisor 1 percent annually to manage their retirement accounts, mostly because a colleague recommended him. Neither has ever heard of an expense ratio. When a friend suggests they open a …

The crash cart that taught me physician-led investing

Harsha Moole, MD

Finance

May 1, 2026

Every physician remembers the first time they ran a code. The adrenaline. The organized chaos. The moment you reach for the crash cart and trust, without thinking, that everything inside it is where it should be, that the medications aren’t expired, and that the equipment has been checked.

But here’s what most physicians don’t think about: Who’s making sure that crash cart is actually compliant? Who’s tracking whether every piece of …

Measuring the real success of modern diversity initiatives

Christoph W. Sossou, MD

Physician

May 1, 2026

Efforts to expand diversity in education and the workforce, through affirmative action, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and policies such as the Rooney Rule, are grounded in a clear objective: to broaden access for groups historically excluded from opportunity. In many settings, these efforts have succeeded. A substantial body of evidence shows that such policies increase representation at the point of entry, particularly in selective institutions and competitive professional …

Physician career choices come down to risk tolerance

Stanley Liu, MD

Finance

April 30, 2026

Suppose you were offered the following two work opportunities. Which would you choose?

Career A: an acceptable opportunity that pays slightly more than your current job; you’re guaranteed never to make less than you do today.

Career B: a dream opportunity that sings to your soul but comes with no guarantees. While you may make much more than you do today, you could also potentially take a six-figure pay cut.

In other words, …

Independent medical practice runs on operations

GetPracticeHelp

Finance

April 30, 2026

Clinical training does not teach operational survival

Clinical training prepares physicians for clinical decisions. It rarely prepares them for the operational decisions that determine whether an independent practice survives the first three years.

A new practice owner may understand diagnosis, treatment, documentation, and patient communication, yet still be unready for payer enrollment, days to get paid, denial management, lease math, compliance deadlines, electronic health record (EHR) tradeoffs, and vendor evaluation. These decisions …

Why health care fraud detection requires payment integrity alignment

Tiffiny Black, DM, MPA, MBA

Policy

April 24, 2026

In one health care organization, a provider was reviewed and cleared through routine payment integrity processes. Months later, that same provider became the subject of a fraud investigation, based on patterns that had been present all along. Both reviews were technically correct within their scope. But together, they revealed something more concerning: The system itself was not aligned. Health care organizations invest heavily in payment integrity (PI) and special investigations …

5 patterns behind health care startups that fail

Harsha Moole, MD

Finance

April 24, 2026

Most health care startups don’t fail because the technology is bad. They fail because of mistakes that happen long before the product ever reaches a clinical setting. After seven years of evaluating health care companies as a physician-scientist turned venture investor (and making over 20 investments across digital health, biotech, medical devices, and therapeutics), I’ve started to see the same patterns repeat.

These aren’t obscure business school failures. They’re patterns that …

Health care investing insights from a venture capital pro

Harsha Moole, MD

Finance

April 16, 2026

A few months ago, a well-connected investor sent me a deal for a surgical device with a proprietary safety feature. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared. Strong intellectual property. Thousands of units sold. Multiple institutional backers across several rounds. The investor who referred it had taken a company to a NASDAQ initial public offering and was putting in his own money.

On paper, this was exactly the kind of deal most …

The medical practice marketing metrics that actually matter

Uday Rajaram

Finance

April 15, 2026

Every month, thousands of physician practices receive a marketing report. It has charts. It has graphs. It shows impressive numbers moving in the right direction. And in most cases, it tells the practice almost nothing about whether their marketing is actually working. After managing paid digital campaigns for cosmetic and aesthetic medical practices, I have seen this pattern repeatedly: practices spending $3,000 to $8,000 per month on marketing, receiving polished …

Health care investing demands thorough clinical diligence

Harsha Moole, MD

Finance

April 12, 2026

Your hospital recently adopted a new piece of technology. Maybe it was an electronic health record (EHR) module. A patient monitoring upgrade. A documentation tool. A new device in the operating room (OR). Think about what happened next. Some of your colleagues embraced it. Others resisted. The nurses figured out workarounds within a week. The information technology (IT) department sent three emails about training sessions that nobody attended. Six months …

Administrative burden is driving severe physician burnout

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Physician

April 12, 2026

You trained for years to become a physician so you could heal people. Yet every day, you find yourself fighting the very system that is supposed to support you. A patient presents with classic symptoms warranting a specific imaging study, medication, or procedure. You know what they need. The evidence is clear. But instead of moving forward with care, you are forced into a gauntlet of prior authorizations, peer-to-peer reviews, …

How physician financial autonomy cures physician burnout

Tonya Kuhn, MD

Finance

April 11, 2026

I am going to say something that will irritate some people. A lot of physician burnout is not coming from medicine. It is coming from financial dependence. We train for more than a decade to master the human body, but many physicians cannot explain how their own money actually works. Not really. They do not know where every account is, what the portfolio actually holds, or what the total fees …

How patient portal message volume drives physician burnout

Candice Elam, DNP

Conditions

April 10, 2026

A patient sends a portal message at 9:17 p.m. on a Tuesday. “Hey, I’ve been having some chest tightness when I climb stairs. It comes and goes. Also can you refill my metformin and check if my last A1C was OK? I don’t want to come in if I don’t have to.” This message requires clinical triage. It requires chart review. It requires a decision about whether to initiate a …

Health care startups desperately need clinical expertise

Harsha Moole, MD

Finance

April 10, 2026

Last year, a startup pitched me a device designed to improve endoscopic procedures in gastroenterology. Slick deck. Strong team. Blue-chip venture capital (VC) backing. One problem: The device added three extra steps to a workflow that gastroenterologists have spent decades optimizing for speed. Any gastrointestinal (GI) physician would have flagged this in the first five minutes. But the investors who wrote the check? None of them had ever held a …

How expiring ACA enhanced premium tax credits hurt business

Kelly Berry

Policy

April 10, 2026

I’ve recently been forced to make painful and difficult choices that impact my personal life as well as my small business because this Congress has been unwilling to renew tax credits that used to significantly lower the cost of my health insurance. My husband and I are both self-employed entrepreneurs. We don’t have access to corporate health plans and the substantial cost sharing that employers typically …

Redefining physician leadership and adversity after a life-changing illness

Bertina Marie Hooks, MD

Physician

April 9, 2026

There are moments in life when the identity you have carefully built over decades is interrupted so abruptly that you are forced to ask who you are when the familiar parts no longer function the way they once did.

For physicians, identity often begins early. We learn to attach meaning to competence, endurance, reliability, and service. We become the person others call when decisions must be made, when systems feel uncertain, …

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