Providing Economic Consulting Services to Health Professionals

摘要

Health economics is a large and growing field, covering important public policy and private business issues. The rapid growth of the health-related industries and the increasingly complex issues they face have created growing opportunities for providing consulting services to health professionals. One of the principal activities of an economic consultant to health professionals is determining what a physician's practice is worth. When a retiring physician wants to sell his or her practice, the climate today in determining a reasonable figure is far different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Before"managed care," which has had a dramatic impact on the way a practice is valued, patients often stayed with their physicians because of their location, the family had always faithfully gone to the physician, or the physician truly "owned" the patients. In today's complex marketplace, however, determining the worth of a practice for a successfully retiring physician or for an associate who wants to buy into a practice has become difficult. Determining the value of practices has therefore become an important aspect of health economics.