Overhead

[Guest guest]

I believe it was this listserv that asked how much the “average” overhead is or patient’s seen to break even. I hadn’t looked at this for a while so decided to look at it. Very rough figuring. But I took total payments for the 1st quarter divided by patients seen; that turned out to be $78.78/patient average payment and I bill mostly 99214’s. Then I just looked at my expenses for the 1st quarter. Keep in mind NJ is high rent, high malpractice state. My total expenses was $28,805 for the quarter. But this doesn’t include malpractice which is paid in July. So if I add 3 months of malpractice, that is an additional $3484 which is $32,289. I see patients in the office 4 days a week. This represents 13 weeks but I took 1 weeks vacation in March so it’s only 12 weeks. That would mean my office costs $2691/week or $672.75 per day to run; or 8.5 patients/day to break even. Rent, payroll, insurance makes up 73% of my costs in that order. Payroll is 22%. And my landlord has nicely frozen my rent for past 3 years instead of the 3% increase/year that was scheduled. Kathy Saradarian, MDNJ