Growing and sustaining your private practice

Whether you’ve just started in private practice or have years of experience running one, you know that health care is constantly evolving, and what may have worked for your practice last year—or even last month—could be different today. It’s critical to stay on top of these trends to help your practice thrive and grow.  

The American Medical Association creates tools and resources aimed at increasing efficiency, engagement and success, so you can focus on your patients and keep your practice open and sustainable.

Keep your practice running

The AMA is fighting to keep private practice a viable option for physicians. We're working to remove unnecessary burdens so physicians can reclaim the time they need to focus on patients. 

Join the AMA

In this podcast mini-series, the AMA helps you navigate business operations and efficiency challenges to grow your private practice. 

Staffing and human resources

Recruiting, hiring and developing dedicated staff is critical to private practice success. This guide (PDF) from the AMA helps you through the process, including tips on interviewing candidates, compensation, countering other offers and more.

Electronic health record (EHR)/information technology (IT)

IT is an essential part of private practice operations, but technology does not have to be intimidating. In this toolkit, you’ll learn how to select, implement and manage an EHR, optimize a patient portal and more.

Marketing and branding

Finding your practice’s identity in your area’s health care marketplace is key to sustained success. The AMA has developed several resources and learning sessions on marketing strategy essentials for private practices.

Private Practice Playbook

Access key steps, best practices and resources for thriving in private practice.

Get Started Now

Along with many other kinds of health care organizations, private physician practices may implement digital health technologies to enable their patients to access care remotely. The AMA telehealth quick guide outlines the first steps to get started and lays out key considerations to implementing telemedicine and explains policy, coding and payment. 

Another resource in this area is the AMA Future of Health Program, which is designed to help practices implement, optimize, sustain and scale telehealth efforts.

If you want your practice to grow, commitment to quality improvement should be a pillar of your strategy. In this learning module, you’ll be introduced to concepts of quality improvement, including measures, interventions and sustainability challenges, among others.

Practice efficiency

AMA Private Practice Simple Solutions are free, open-access rapid learning cycles designed to provide opportunities to implement changes that can immediately increase efficiency in your practice. 

Simplifying service delivery

Identifying unnecessary tasks that burden physicians can help improve practice efficiency. This learning module empowers you to find the “stupid stuff” in practice processes and change it for the better.

Change management and organizational development

This learning module helps you apply organizational development principles to a health care setting to navigate change and drive practice transformation.

Leadership and team well-being

Leaders set the tone for a business’s culture, which affects the well-being of staff. Use this learning module to cultivate leadership behaviors while increasing team satisfaction and reducing burnout.

Strengthening team culture

A positive, supportive team culture is a key factor in private practice success. In this module, learn how to assess your practice’s culture and find ways to improve and grow it.  

Addressing burnout

Learn about the Listen-Sort-Empower approach to eradicating the root causes of professional burnout, adapted from a model used for decades by the Mayo Clinic.

Prepare you and your team to discuss and advance health and racial equity in your private practice with this learning module.

Dive deeper to explore more AMA resources on growing and sustaining your private practice. 

Identify and address challenges in your private practice before they affect your operations. 

Addressing business challenges

Getting started in private practice

Is private practice right for you? An overview.