Your practice has worked hard to expand to a second location or a third or a fourth. These can be other ASCs at which your group provides anesthesia, satellite offices for your cardiology group, or additional G.I. centers for your gastroenterology practice — the story runs across all medical specialties.
But what happens when one of the members of your group who is assigned to work at different sites, acts out on his or her bias against working at a particular location, perhaps by showing up late, or by making untoward comments to the staff, or by engaging in some other type of disruptive behavior?
The answer, of course, is that slowly but surely it begins to destroy your business opportunities. An anesthesiologist showing up late at a surgery center can be the beginning of the end of your group’s entire relationship with that facility. The cardiologist who doesn’t like working at your satellite office in the suburbs can easily telegraph this to referring physicians, drying up streams of business.
Certainly, there are personnel, management, and contractual issues involved. But on the purely contractual side, your practice’s employment agreement or subcontract agreement with physicians must either delineate level of service expectations or make reference to policies and procedures that must be complied with. And your group must have “teeth” to enforce compliance as well as the will to do so.
Practices fall apart from the inside more often than most realize.
Take the time to analyze the contractual protections your group has developed, or hasn’t developed, now, before you need to start looking at what you can enforce.
