The golden ratio for making money

The Tea Room

There are much better ways to run a clinic and health economist Tracey Johnson has crunched the numbers for you.

It can be hard graft running a business but there are smarter ways to ramp up financial and professional rewards.

Tracey Johnson in CEO at Inala Primary Care. She’s spent years as a health economist, policy advisor and helping health-tech start-ups scale up big. Today on The Tea Room Tracey spills the tea on the simple economics of right-sizing GP clinics.

“There's a sweet point if you've got four to five GPS, you know, there's a business model that can be formed around that. The next sort of tipping point seems to sit at around nine to 12 doctors, and then again up around 20 doctors,” Tracey says.

Subleasing to pathology and other allied health is critical to being viable as is hot desking consult rooms across longer opening hours.

Tracey Johnson says that if you're running a practice with nine doctors, and you've got the capacity to move up to 12 doctors, the way you might do that is by opening from seven o'clock in the morning until seven o'clock at night with doctors working different shifts depending on their lifestyle needs.

“And by reducing the cognitive burden that happens from working too many hours on those really long days, practices are actually finding doctors enjoy their work more, you get more utilisation around those rooms and generally things come together better for the patients as well,” Tracey says.

Tracey is also smashing down the traditional barriers between the Local Health District and Public Health Network in her region. And she has a strong motivation to do so working in Queensland's largest housing commission suburb.

“We have the highest rate of disability pensioners in the state in this suburb. We have five jails just down the road. I've spent the last decade looking at what I can bring out of hospitals and give into patient hands and into the hands of primary care providers to actually make life better for everyone,” she says.

P.s If $8 billion of fraud was floating around in your GP bank account we know this episode wouldn’t be listened to. As it is, we know it will be very popular.

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