Structure your practice for ongoing business success
As registered members of the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), your regulatory body, you are bound by a strict set of ethical and legal standards as prescribed by the HPCSA regulations and guidelines.
The HPCSA is quite clear on the manner and vehicles through which healthcare practitioners are able to run their practices. It is therefore important that due cognisance is taken of these rules before embarking on the process of registering a company with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC), previously known as CIPRO.
As a healthcare professional you need to maintain direct liability for the treatment provided to your patients. Unlike most other businesses, healthcare practitioners cannot hide behind a corporate veil should a patient want to sue them for malpractice. In the case of a registered company, aggrieved clients are able to take legal action against the company rather than the owner of the business. As healthcare professionals we are not afforded this alternative.
When establishing a healthcare practice you can opt for any of the following:
- Solus Practitioner – This means running your business in your own name, as an individual.
- Partnership – In instances where your business is run with a partner or partners.
- Association – When you are running your business in association with other healthcare professionals.
- Incorporated Company – This is when you run your business with other healthcare professionals as shareholders.
It’s important you investigate and understand your options before making a decision on which would be best suited to your needs. Many healthcare professionals opt to start their practice as a one-person practice, trading in their personal capacity without formally registering the business. In such instances, it is highly advisable to introduce carefully structured and well-planned strategies to monitor and track the performance of the business.
We often find that start-up healthcare practices run their personal and business expenses from the same bank account without the necessary accounting practices being in place. As a result, the business owner has no idea of the current financial status and the viability of the practice. This underscores the importance of careful financial management, and the need to regularly analyse the performance of the business.
Unfortunately, many practices base their financial success entirely on their bank balance, which means that by the time they realise they are in dire straights, it may be far too late to implement the necessary changes and interventions.
In the case of the Solus Practitioner, the SARS annual tax submission requirement is that individual and practice income and expenses are submitted together after the February year-end. However, it is advisable to rather run personal and business finances separately throughout the year and to merge these only prior to the annual tax submission after obtaining good tax advice.
It is important to view the practice as a business and an investment, which will offer good returns in the future. For this reason, it is advisable to look at the business structure of the practice with a long-term view to ensure that a business approach is adopted from the outset with a view to making the practice attractive to prospective buyers in the future.
If EZMed doesn’t improve your healthcare practice in 30 days or less you can cancel, risk free. That’s right, no risk. All the features and services, yours to use at no cost for 30 days while you evaluate our product.
EZMed delivers intelligent coding, with clinical relevance into your Practice Management Application. These codes include:
- Reference Price List (RPL) / Treatment codes
- ICD-10 codes
- External cause codes where required
- NAPPI codes with their individual descriptions and pricing
We also have our vast Funders File, covering the 83 medical schemes with their more than 340 various plan types. If you need to know what the rate is for which any medical scheme reimburses treatment, we have the rate you need.
For on-the-move management of your practice, you need a system that functions on all your devices, be it desktops, laptops, tablets or your mobile phone. With our browser based responsive web design, practice management can be in your office or in your pocket!
Choose your device, and from there you can:
- Manage your patient diary and day-plan
- Quickly add a new patient
- Add your treatment on the fly