Pros
Streamlined workflow: company has own EMR, support team to provide immediate support, use tiger text. You will not find a system like theirs anywhere else. Flexible schedule (but no PTO)
Cons
Mainly, the pay is laughable and demeaning. You get 30% of what you gross. So you basically need to see around 40-50 pts/day to hit $100k. I previously worked in a private office setting and saw around 20-30 pts/day and brought in min $500/day plus a bonus structure of 40% of whatever I grossed over $500 & typically made a bonus between $200-300 (sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less). Healthdrive is a huge corporation that likely pays CEOs in the millions--they can afford to pay us fairly (CEO Daniel Baker's net worth is ~$5 million). Other companies such as Pedirite & Sightrite pay 40% of gross earnings, FYI, and you are able to benefit from the perks of having a 1099 (i.e. professional expenses such as scrubs). I see between 20-30 pts/day and am probably bringing in only ~$60k/yr. For how little the pay is, you'd expect some decent benefits perhaps, but nope: not even a few PTO days or decent, affordable health insurance. You do not have any support staff so you will contort your body in all sorts of ways while seeing pts in chairs, beds, etc, which is difficult and painful if you're seeing 20-30 pts/day, let alone 50 pts/day. They won't expense many things that you will need to work, such as scrubs. I personally didn't own more than 1-2 pairs of scrubs (I changed into them at the hospital when I did surgery and wore business casual in the office). Lots of driving and mileage reimbursement is a joke. Benefits are trash: pay a lot, get almost nothing. They offer benefits but ya know it's like $1k/mo with a $5k/yr deductible (and that's the best plan). You can generally take off as much time as you want, which is nice, but absolutely NO PTO. Lots of unpaid "training" where you have to talk on the phone biweekly for around 8 weeks with the company's billing "specialist." I totalled my phone calls with this person and it was almost 4 hours, unpaid and always on her schedule, so it would end up being like 4 or 5 pm every night when I'm trying to make my kids dinner. The basics of the EMR are ridiculously easy--esp for anyone who has gone thru the amount of training in school/residency we have, and you're mostly doing nails/calluses (with the occasional surprise wound/infection/etc) so it ain't rocket science and I have no idea why this had to be so involved. I barely had any flagged billing issues, but was constantly being nitpicked about the way i wrote notes (which everyone, incl the billing specialist, said were extremely thorough) by someone who doesn't have any medical training at all for things that were entirely unrelated to billing and were really irrelevant to patient care and a total waste of my (unpaid) time!
