Modern Health Care Magazine has chosen Dr. Their Griego Raby as the recipient of its fifth annual Physician Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The person chosen for the award had to be an M.D. or D.O owns a practice and demonstrates the financial or market success of that business. The literature is replete with articles about physicians becoming employees or seeking to join an ACO or burning out. Seldom do we hear that the practice of medicine can be entrepreneurial and clinically rewarding.

So it came to be with Dr. Raby, a primary care physician who has had a lifelong concern about nontraditional medicine. Working an Academic setting she single handly grew a new division of “Integrative Medicine”. For those not familiar it really means bringing together a total approach to the patient in which all forms of medicine are brought to bear on the patient. From acupuncture to nutritional Counseling to psychological evaluations, this physician practice management has created a Integrative Medicine Practice not in academia but rather as a Private Practice.

Raby’s integrative approach combines standard medical testing with holistic evaluations. Within her practice are many disciplines that integrate and focus on the patient problem list. So here we find a practitioner with a vision but without the administrative model to make it successful.

Dr. Raby brought in John Ruhl, a healthcare marketing veteran who could see that she had a clear vision of what she wanted her practice to be and then handpicked the best people to staff her practice. What has made her successful is her incredible clinical documentation ability and being smart enough to know she had a great product to sell but the needed the help to run it. This is called “Practice Management”.

Physicians are entrepreneurs by the very nature of what they train to do but bureaucracy of the government, private payer and health plans discourage and deflate the idea of being entrepreneurial. So physicians consider employment and other ways of not having to do administrative work. There is much room for “Private Practice” to create models of health care. What is required is a belief in a Vision and the boldness to go out and try it. There are many potential models for creating a great health care delivery system with Government oversight and control. So where are the entrepreneurs. Congratulations to Dr. Raby!

Great medical practice management is not just hiring a person but rather implementing a model with well-designed roles, carefully sculpted space and fine tuning process and procedures that support the patient negotiating the Practice.