One of the very first "must-do" things when you're looking at starting any business is determining a) how much it costs to start and run and b) how much revenue you can bring in!
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It can get really confusing when you start trying to figure out how to put everything together, and so I want to break this down for you, and show you how to come up with your potential revenue and what that looks like.
First things first, you need to understand how the business is set up. In our Business Academy, we teach our students to initially start their business using a service-fee model. In this setup scenario, the physician office bills insurance directly (because they are already credentialed and in-network) and the mobile ultrasound company charges the physician client a fee to provide the services in their office. This way, you don't have to waste months of time and energy AND purchase your equipment and be forking over the monthly payments before you are even credentialed. Insurance credentialing is confusing and time consuming, and did I mention the insurance groups can tell you they don't need anymore providers? But not until after you've waited months for them to respond. Want more info on this? Head over to our blog post HERE for some further details.
So, now that you have a little heads up on how the business model looks, let's chat about revenue potential....
The average amount a mobile ultrasound company can charge is about $125/hour. We suggest setting out blocks of time at your client offices so you aren't driving around all over creation doing one ultrasound here and two ultrasounds there...when they know you're coming in every week on Tuesdays for example, the office books all their ultrasound patients into that particular time slot, you show up and provide the services.
Let's do a little math here. AT $125/hour, a half day (4hr) time slot is $500 in revenue and a full day (8hr) time slot is $1000 in revenue. This is then the total gross revenue back to your mobile ultrasound company for providing the services in their office. It will take some time to build up those accounts to 5 days per week, but the average monthly revenue back at full capacity then with an average of 20 working days a month is $20,000 per month. With such low overhead, this is really the way to start this business.
Different areas of the country will differ as far as the amount to charge, some will be a bit less and others a bit more, but $125 is a great average to do your initial revenue analysis on. And the best part about this setup is that due to Stark and Anti-Kickback laws, physicians are not legally able to make any profit off of patients they are referring out to the hospital or imaging center. So you're bringing in an opportunity for the physician to make a revenue off of something he or she is already ordering, while your company does 99% of the work. AND it saves the patient a ton of money as opposed to going to the hospital for their scan, so it's not a only a win/win, it's a win/win/win for all parties involved!
BUT it has to be set up correctly! The laws governing this setup are strict and there are a lot of them. You need to ensure your service contract is set up to carve out all of the exceptions in the laws that pertain to providing mobile ultrasound services inside a physician practice.
Need help navigating this? Head over to our website to learn more about us and our Business Academy courses, or shoot me over an email: jennifer@aisolutions.info. We are here to help!
Until next week!
