Physician finance

710 articles · Since 2015

Physicians writing on KevinMD about their own money and the business of practice: student loans and forgiveness, disability and life insurance, index funds and retirement accounts, whether to hire an advisor, financial independence and retiring early, side income and real estate, contracts, non-competes, and signing bonuses, locum tenens and leaving clinical practice, selling a practice to private equity, and leaving insurance for direct primary care. Four maintained records draw on this archive: Physician personal finance: what physicians say about their own money, in their own words, Private equity and corporate medicine: what physicians say, in their own words, Direct primary care: what physicians say, in their own words, and Physician careers: what physicians say about jobs, contracts, and leaving clinical practice, in their own words.

Latest articles

Incapacity planning is about authority, not family

Mike Chando, MBA

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

In a recent KevinMD podcast, palliative physician Kirsten Engel and writer Medha Tripathi described a patient they called Mr. L. He was dying in the hospital. He could not speak for himself, no family visited, and he had never named…

The team believed comfort measures and hospice would serve him best. In his case, decisions of that weight …

The 457(b) plan risks physicians sign without knowing

Mike Chando, MBA

October 3, 2026Oct 3, 2026

On a Tuesday evening, Dr. Anna Reyes is offered a partnership in an independent group across town. Accepting means leaving the nonprofit health system that employs her, and the buy-in requires capital within the year. Anna is hypothetical. That night,…

That night, she opens the statement for the 457(b) deferred compensation plan she has funded for eight years. The balance is about $500,000. She wants to know how much of it she can …

Dennis Hursh, Esq, on physician employment contracts: a KevinMD subscriber spotlight

Subscriber Spotlight by KevinMD

October 2, 2026Oct 2, 2026

Dennis Hursh, Esq is a health law attorney with more than 40 years of experience and the founder of Physician Agreements Health Law, which reviews physician employment agreements for a fixed fee. He has published 27 essays on KevinMD since…

…

Real physician voices, twice a week

Free, and one click to unsubscribe.

Revenue cycle management is more than medical billing

GetPracticeHelp

September 28, 2026Sep 28, 2026

Ask an independent practice owner who handles the revenue cycle and the answer is usually the name of a billing company. Ask what that company actually does each month and the answer gets shorter. Claims go out. Payments get posted. Denials get worked. Statements get mailed. That is medical billing, and it is valuable work. It is not the same thing as managing the revenue cycle, and the space …

Physicians paid for G2211 twice. Most never bill it.

Michael Duben, MD

September 23, 2026Sep 23, 2026

In 2024, Medicare cut every physician's rates about 2 percent to fund a code that 3 out of 4 of them never billed. The cut was automatic. The code has to be claimed by hand. The code is G2211. CMS…

In 2024, Medicare cut every physician’s rates about 2 percent to fund a code that 3 out of 4 of them never billed. The cut was automatic. The code has to be claimed by hand.

The code is G2211. CMS calls it a visit complexity add-on. In plain words, it pays for office visits where you are the patient’s ongoing doctor, either as the continuing focal point for all their care …

Why physician financial freedom matters more than salary

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

September 17, 2026Sep 17, 2026

An excerpt from Essays and Echoes: Reflections from a Life in Medicine. In the CBS series Blue Bloods, the 2014 episode "Most Wanted" finds Assistant District Attorney Erin Reagan considering leaving her government job to join a private law firm.…

An excerpt from Essays and Echoes: Reflections from a Life in Medicine.

In the CBS series Blue Bloods, the 2014 episode “Most Wanted” finds Assistant District Attorney Erin Reagan considering leaving her government job to join a private law firm. The appeal is clear. The new job would pay much more, and her daughter is nearing college age. Erin is not choosing between good and greed. She is …

Charitable giving for physicians: 7 strategies for 2026

Logan Foltz, MD

September 12, 2026Sep 12, 2026

Americans give hundreds of billions of dollars to charity each year, making philanthropy a defining feature of our national culture. That generosity benefits more than the organizations and communities receiving support: Research suggests that giving can also improve the donor’s happiness, sense of purpose, and connection to others. Our government actively encourages this behavior through charitable tax deductions and other incentives, reflecting a longstanding public-policy judgment that private generosity …

The sweet spot before physician financial independence

Stanley Liu, MD

September 12, 2026Sep 12, 2026

Many physicians believe they can't escape burnout or an unsustainable career until they've become financially independent. Thankfully, it's not true. The idea of financial independence (FI) is simple: build enough wealth such that earned income becomes optional. For financial planners,…

Many physicians believe they can’t escape burnout or an unsustainable career until they’ve become financially independent. Thankfully, it’s not true.

The idea of financial independence (FI) is simple: build enough wealth such that earned income becomes optional. For financial planners, financial independence is a mathematical problem to solve. I might be able to run your numbers in a Monte Carlo analysis and demonstrate you have, say, an 84 percent chance of …

Negotiating physician compensation works better in groups

Contract Diagnostics

September 10, 2026Sep 10, 2026

Most physicians who have ever asked for a raise or tried negotiating their compensation have likely heard some version of the same sentence: "We have a standard package for the whole department. I can't make an exception for you." Most…

Most physicians who have ever asked for a raise or tried negotiating their compensation have likely heard some version of the same sentence: “We have a standard package for the whole department. I can’t make an exception for you.”

Most doctors hear that as a brush-off. It isn’t. It’s the most honest thing an administrator will say to you all year.

They genuinely can’t do it. A one-off adjustment creates a parity …

How doctors lose money investing: 6 failure modes

Harsha Moole, MD

September 9, 2026Sep 9, 2026

I have been pitched investments in a doctors' lounge, at a conference dinner, and twice in a specialty group chat. Every one of them came from another physician. That is not bad luck. That is the design. This piece is…

I have been pitched investments in a doctors’ lounge, at a conference dinner, and twice in a specialty group chat. Every one of them came from another physician. That is not bad luck. That is the design.

This piece is about the specific ways physician money gets lost, and what actually works against each one. Not general advice about saving more. Named failure modes, with the fix for each. I have …

Credit balances in medical practices have a deadline

GetPracticeHelp

September 8, 2026Sep 8, 2026

Most independent practices know their accounts receivable to the dollar. Far fewer can say what their credit balances total, how old the oldest one is, or who is supposed to be doing something about them. A credit balance sits in the practice management system as a negative number on a patient or payer account, it rarely triggers an alert, and it quietly inflates the bank balance the owner looks at …

Physician autonomy predicts who leaves, not exhaustion

Harsha Moole, MD

September 2, 2026Sep 2, 2026

A friend told me he had counted it out. Eleven more years and he could stop. He said it the way you would read a lab value, flat, no feeling in it. He is a good doctor. He was not…

A friend told me he had counted it out. Eleven more years and he could stop. He said it the way you would read a lab value, flat, no feeling in it. He is a good doctor. He was not describing a job. He was describing a sentence he had to serve.

That word, trapped, comes up more than exhaustion does.

This piece is about that feeling and what the evidence actually …

Patient balance collection is nobody’s actual job

Karan Kanwar

September 2, 2026Sep 2, 2026

A patient is checking out after a routine visit, and the front desk has to say the number out loud: 400 dollars, today, under the deductible. The patient's face changes. The staffer wasn't hired for this conversation and doesn't have…

A patient is checking out after a routine visit, and the front desk has to say the number out loud: 400 dollars, today, under the deductible. The patient’s face changes. The staffer wasn’t hired for this conversation and doesn’t have much beyond “that’s what the system says you owe.”

This exact scene runs in practices everywhere, multiple times a day, and almost nobody standing at that desk was ever specifically trained …

Student loans are not blocking your practice ownership

Brian Hanks, MBA, CFP

August 30, 2026Aug 30, 2026

Clinicians are trained to demand certainty before they act. In the operatory or the exam room, that risk-averse instinct is exactly what keeps patients safe. Applied to career decisions, the same instinct becomes one of the most expensive habits in…

There is a sentence I hear almost every week from young clinicians, and it sounds so responsible that nobody ever questions it: “I’ll think about ownership once my …

How to run private fund due diligence like a reviewer

Harsha Moole, MD

August 26, 2026Aug 26, 2026

I have reviewed manuscripts for more than thirty journals. The habit is always the same. Skip the abstract. Go straight to the methods, because that is where the paper either holds up or falls apart. Then a fund pitch lands…

I have reviewed manuscripts for more than thirty journals. The habit is always the same. Skip the abstract. Go straight to the methods, because that is where the paper either holds up or falls apart.

Then a fund pitch lands in your inbox and the habit disappears. The deck opens with a big number, and most of us read that number the way we would never read an abstract.

First, the words, …

Prior authorization appeals stopped being a decision

Karan Kanwar

August 24, 2026Aug 24, 2026

The letter says denied. It's not the first one this month, and the physician already knows how this goes: Read it, feel briefly annoyed, and move on to the next patient, because the last three appeals went nowhere and there's…

The letter says denied. It’s not the first one this month, and the physician already knows how this goes: Read it, feel briefly annoyed, and move on to the next patient, because the last three appeals went nowhere and there’s no real reason to think this one would be different.

Nothing about that moment is really a decision anymore. It stopped being one a while back, and nobody noticed exactly when.

The …

The revenue gap a physician notice period never closes

GetPracticeHelp

August 24, 2026Aug 24, 2026

A resignation letter arrives with ninety days written on it. Most practices read that as ninety days to find a replacement, and the search starts that afternoon. What the letter actually started is three clocks running at once, and only one of them speeds up when the practice hires faster. The payer contracts have their own notice terms. The medical records have their own custody obligations. And the replacement physician, …

Retirement account taxes distort physician net worth

Mike Chando, MBA

August 23, 2026Aug 23, 2026

Your net worth statement is the only financial document in America that routinely counts someone else's money as yours. It lists the retirement accounts, the brokerage, the house, the practice interest, and adds them with the quiet confidence of arithmetic.…

Your net worth statement is the only financial document in America that routinely counts someone else’s money as yours.

It lists the retirement accounts, the brokerage, the house, the practice interest, and adds them with the quiet confidence of arithmetic. The number is not wrong so much as incomplete. It books your assets at gross, and the largest have a co-owner who has not yet invoiced you. A $5 million pre-tax …

How to run a drill on your physician succession plan

Mike Chando, MBA

August 21, 2026Aug 21, 2026

In 2009, a New England Journal of Medicine analysis examined 84,730 patients undergoing inpatient general and vascular surgery and ranked the hospitals by risk-adjusted mortality. The expectation was that the best-performing hospitals would be the ones where less went wrong.…

That is not what the data showed. Major complications occurred in 16.2 percent of patients at hospitals in the lowest-mortality quintile and 18.2 percent at hospitals in the highest. Overall complications …

You already run clinical diligence on every rollout

Harsha Moole, MD

August 21, 2026Aug 21, 2026

Your hospital recently adopted a new piece of technology. Maybe it was an EHR module. A patient monitoring upgrade. A documentation tool. A new device in the OR. Think about what happened next. Some of your colleagues embraced it. Others…

Your hospital recently adopted a new piece of technology. Maybe it was an EHR module. A patient monitoring upgrade. A documentation tool. A new device in the OR.

Think about what happened next. Some of your colleagues embraced it. Others resisted. The nurses figured out workarounds within a week. The IT department sent three emails about training sessions that nobody attended. Six months later, half the staff is using the new …

Physician finance

Latest articles

Real physician voices, twice a week

The Podcast

Latest episodes

Most popular

The Podcast

Latest episodes

Most popular