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For physicians, 2011 will be about trying to understand where they fit among the changes arising from healthcare reform and what those changes will mean to their practices.

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are being discussed at length in medical circles and while many physicians see them as the picture how healthcare will look in the future, they worry about losing their autonomy in directing how their patients are treated.
More than 50% of today’s residents will elect to be employed. Given the difficulty of obtaining loans and the uncertainty surrounding healthcare reform, self-employed physicians are left wondering how they’ll survive. The new rules make it difficult to near impossible to get on managed care plans. Between that and the cost of malpractice insurance, the single practitioner in private practice is going to become nearly extinct.
 
The sheer economics of medicine is causing anxiety – especially for physicians in South Florida. Managed care reimbursements are significantly lower here than elsewhere – about 70-80% of Medicare. So it follows that physicians must see more patients in order to have a profitable practice. Plus there are the additional costs associated with running a practice – from staff to handle the billing and paperwork connected to collecting reimbursements to the expenses related to moving towards EMRs. These add up quickly.
 
These factors – and the anxieties they naturally create – make understandable the attraction of being on a payroll. There’s a guaranteed income, assistance with marketing, the prospect of a more normal workweek, malpractice coverage and the benefits of being associated with a larger organization when it comes to business management.
 
So as 2011 begins and we move further and further down the implementation timeline, as many questions are raised as are answered and many physicians wait to see how they changes will affect them and their practices.