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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Brittney Anderson, MD, FAAFP, on Building a Successful Independent Practice
00:12:34
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- [00:00]
A
This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I have the privilege today to visit with Dr. Brittany Anderson. And Dr. Anderson is both a doctor, but she's also a coach of doctors and talks to physicians about building the practices, hanging out their shingle, having some independence and autonomy. Dr. Andersen, first off, tell us about yourself and your background and thank you so much for joining us today.
- [00:25]
B
Thanks Scott, so much. I'm so excited to be here and to chat with you today. So like you mentioned, my name is Brittany Anderson. I'm a family medicine physician. I am in private practice in Alabama and insurance based practice. I this coming July, So July of 2026, I will have been in practice for four years. I love practicing medicine. I went through the similar pathway to most physicians, right? We go through our medical school training, we get into residency. I went to a pretty large family medicine residency here in Alabama. There are 15 of us in each class and just like the other 14 residents in my cohort, we all went out into employed practice because that's the model these days. I feel like that's the model that we're taught through our training. That's what we get exposure in. So I did that for two years. I tell people there were times in employee practice, it was me, a receptionist and a nurse in an fqhc, a federally qualified health center in someday. Scott There was no nurse, it was just me and the receptionist. Some days there was no receptionist, it was just me and the nurse. And some days there was no nurse or receptionist, it was just me. I was triaging patients, I was answering the phone, I was doing all the things. So as you can imagine, that was not sustainable. I did it. I loved the mission of that practice and again loved practicing medicine. It just, it didn't fulfill me, it didn't give me what I needed to be able to have a long sustainable career in medicine. So I left that, went to academics, went back to the institution that I trained at. And anyone who has been a part of anything in academic medicine for any period of time realizes that sometimes you get to a point where there are things that you want to change, but it's almost impossible to change them in these big systems. You know, wanting to do something differently for yourself, for staff, for patients, and having to go through the different levels or layers of asking was tough for me. So I buckled down one day, went back to the thought that I'd had when I was a pre med student, when I was a high school student shadowing docs who were in private practice. And that is what I went to. I did it, you know, without a coach or without many mentors and error and. But really marketed the practice like crazy and started the practice with a full panel of patients. Like, I use social media to. To my advantage. I market it like crazy. And here we are four years later with me practicing medicine. I built the practice, really expanded it. Now I love coaching other docs and starting their practices.
- [02:55]
A
And I'm going to ask you the tough question, and you don't have to answer this, Dr. Anderson, if you're not comfortable answering this question, let me know if you're ready.
- [03:03]
B
All right, Hit it.
- [03:04]
A
Okay, so here is the question. Duke versus unc.
- [03:08]
B
Oh, my gosh.
- [03:10]
A
Who do you cheer for in the Duke UNC game?
- [03:12]
B
That's not even. You said a tough question. And that is the easiest question I've answered literally all day. It is Duke every day, twice on Sundays. I am a proud Duke grad. I bleed Duke blue. I was in here in Alabama. I was in Birmingham, I think is where I was. It was Birmingham. And there was a kid, and I say kid, he was maybe 17, 18 years old, but had on a UNC sweatshirt. And. And me just in full Duke mode. This was in March, and so I thought he meant it. And so I see him and I say, like every good dookie to someone in a UNC anything, I say, go to hell, Carolina. And this kid looked at me and it was probably a sweatshirt that like his grandmother had bought him or something. He had no idea why I was screaming at him at the gas station. But Duke, every day, all day.
- [03:57]
A
Scott, that is the funniest thing I ever heard. So the thing is, one of my closest colleagues is a guy, Bart Walker, who's a, you know, UNC grad. Another really close colleague is a Duke grad. And I have a brother in law who's a Duke grad. So what. What do we tell. Tell me again, what do we tell
- [04:12]
B
the North Carolina grad to go to hell in that?
- [04:15]
A
It's fantastic. Got it. We've got it. We will have that on. We will have that to him sometime today. I love that.
- [04:21]
B
Listen, one year when I was there, maybe the provost pulled out a whole ad in the Our, like the Duke paper and about why we shouldn't do it, why we shouldn't say that, how awful it is. And it truly is awful to tell anybody. Go to hell. But how awful. And then the students took out one the next day and it was like, you know, sorry, sir, the devil made us do it.
- [04:43]
A
I absolutely Love that. So talk a little bit about, you know, you've moved back to independent practice. Congratulations. And I see great physicians throughout the country, you know, wanting to go back to independent practice and so many are scared to do so. But at the same time, if you go back to independent practice today there's such a shortage of primary care physicians, internal medicine physicians. If you could figure out the billing and everything else, you're going to be busy.
- [05:07]
B
You're right.
- [05:07]
A
Talk a little bit about, talk about a little bit about what kind of did it take? Was it, was it scary to go back to independent practice and what advice would you give to others that want to go back to independent practice?
- [05:18]
B
Yeah, it absolutely was scary. It was scary and it wasn't easy. I tell people that private practice is not for every, for everyone. It is hard, but we've done hard things. We did organic chemistry, we did med school, we did intern year, all those things. But you're exactly right. And I love how you use the term go back. Right. So I was pulling up some stats a couple weeks ago. In, in 2012, 60.1% of practices were physician owned, their private practices physician owned. We're now in at 2024 where that number has significantly decreased to 42.2%. The AMA put out a really good article here recently and it goes back to what I was saying earlier. I think that we just don't get it in our training. One of my new favorite things to do is not just to talk to do who are decided that they want to go into private practice. But I've been going to residency programs and I went to one recently. They gave me 45 minutes and an hour and a half into it, the residents were still asking questions. Because we don't get it in our training and because we don't get it, we come out of our training or we get three, four, five years into employed practice. We hate it, we're completely burned out. But we don't realize that there is an option to go and do it independently. And as I mentioned earlier, it's not easy, but it's possible. And it's even more possible when you, you know, when you work through the process, when you accept help, if help is there in the startup of the process. But most importantly, if you're realistic about what it will take, if you're realistic about the timelines and if you're realistic in choosing your model, are you going to be an insurance based practice? Meaning are you okay with dealing with the hassles that come with taking insurance and credentialing and reimbursement to know that you know that that reimbursement is coming or, and you have to see a good number of patients who do that. Or do you want a direct care practice? Do you want to be direct primary care or direct specialty care? Meaning you've got to get out there and market like crazy in order to get patients in the door, patients who will pay that cash price that you set. And so for docs who are thinking about private practice, the first thing I would say is that it is absolutely possible and that private practice is not dead. I am running a very successful seven figure practice, insurance based family medicine in Alabama. It can absolutely be done. It's just a matter of changing that mindset so that we are no longer, quote, unquote, just the physician, but we are the physician and the owner, we are the CEO of the practice that we're building and that we're running.
- [07:54]
A
I think just literally, literally fantastic. And talk about do you have to be concierge or can you do it without being concierge? Because so many people are moving towards concierge today. But of course everybody can afford that. But, but you could do it either way, can't you?
- [08:08]
B
You're right, you can absolutely do it every way. And I'm proof of that. And of the docs that I coach, I do some one to one coaching with docs and we work through this process. I'd say that it's about half and half and maybe even skewed a little bit more to docs who are still good old traditional insurance based medicine. You know, physicians and patients are getting to a point where we're all a little bit burned out with the idea of insurance and the costs that come with insurance, whether that is financial costs, cost and time hassle, those kinds. But the traditional model still in this country is insurance based medicine. One of the things that we've got to realize as physicians, whether we are primary care physicians, specialty physicians, is the importance of appropriately coding and billing for the work that we do, for making sure that we stay on top of our billing, that our front desk is actually collecting co pays and deductibles and things like that. And when we can do that, like I said earlier, we take on that hat of being the owner of a business and not just the, you know, the seeing patients, but when we really work this like it's a business, the financial part comes and that is the part that I think trips so many people up and what people go to when they're thinking about making a decision, they make that decision solely based on what revenue would be or what they think income would look like. And there's so many other factors, including our own ability to run a practice that we've got to think about and
- [09:32]
A
how satisfying it is as well. I mean, because you end up having control, your own destiny, not being somebody else's employee. And there's a lot to be said for that. It's a wonderful thing.
- [09:41]
B
Absolutely. I'm at a point, Scott, that I do not believe I can ever in life work for anyone again. I cannot do it. I love the autonomy that comes with it. My staff meets every Wednesday at 12 o'. Clock. We can make decisions and at 1 o', clock, when the doors open again, those decisions go into effect. Whether they are good decisions or bad decisions, we'll find out later. But it's my decision. It's our decision to make.
- [10:05]
A
But isn't that the wonderful thing about a mid sized or small business? You could actually see point A to point B in what you're doing versus cascading through multiple layers and so forth. And we all know sometimes big is needed for certain things, but it is much more satisfying and quite frankly, you're doing it financially really well too, to be able to be the size and be able to take your ideas and make them go. I just love that.
- [10:30]
B
Absolutely.
- [10:31]
A
Take a second on what are you most focused on and excited about?
- [10:35]
B
Currently, I am most excited about coaching docs one to one as they build their private practice. I started off so I hold some leadership positions within our state. I was the current chair and immediate past president of our Alabama chapter of the American Academy of Family Physicians. I serve on our state medical association and both of those put me right in the middle of groups of physicians all the time. Our clinic is very active on social media and so very often, Scott, I'd have docs come to me and say, hey, I see your practice doing this. Hey, it looks like your practice is doing really well. I'm thinking about private practice. How do I do this? And what happened is I found myself answering the same questions over and over and over and over again. So I created a podcast and I said, you know what that question is? Episode 17. Go check it out. Call me back if you have questions in the. Call me back if you have questions. Continue to come. I realized that people wanted to dig even deeper than the things that I was addressing in the podcast. And so I, you know, hired another doc into the practice, which has been fantastic. It's given me so much more freedom to do other things. And I've been able to open up a day where I can just do one to one coaching with docs. So the most exciting thing right now is, is really realizing that the pendulum is shifting a little bit. I think we're, you know, this generation of docs that are coming out, many of us don't want to be employed. We want to practice medicine the way we thought. We were going to medical school to practice medicine in private practice. Independent practice is what gives that to so many of us.
- [12:06]
A
It is really remarkable what you're doing. I we're going to invite you to come speak at one of the Becker's healthcare meetings and speak about what you're doing. I love what you're doing. Dr. Andersen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you joining us today on the Becker's Healthcare podcast and how inspiring you are for everybody in terms of what you do and what you're doing. Just literally fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [12:29]
B
Thank you. I've appreciated this so much.