Private Practitioners Want to Control Costs

Given fixed Medicare and managed care payments, one way physicians can keep their private practices in the black is by identifying costs they can control. These include human-resource expenses, spreading fixed costs out as much as possible, and exploiting the latest information technology.

But how might a psychiatrist harness information technology to control costs? One way is to run nearly the entire practice on a laptop. Psychiatrist Amy Berlin, M.D., who has a solo practice in San Francisco, explained how she does it at this year's APA annual meeting. Read about her nearly paper-free practice in Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/15/11.full.

Some psychiatrists are also getting serious about using electronic health records to save time and space and keep staff costs down. For more information about psychiatrists' experiences in the cyberspace realm, see Psychiatric News at http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/45/8/6.1.full.

And more information about how to use technology and the Web to minimize administrative overhead and enhance clinical services is found in American Psychiatric Publishing's Entering Private Practice: A Handbook for Psychiatrists. Purchasing information is available at www.appi.org/SearchCenter/Pages/SearchDetail.aspx?ItemID=62141.

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