SDPA Committee Meeting - Private and Group Practice Administration (PGPA)

Private and Group Practice Administration (PGPA)

December 17, 2024  6:00 PM

LOCATION:  Zoom 

PARTICIPATION:  Only SDPA Members 

Is prosperity a dirty word? It seemed that way to me in graduate school, based on my professors’ responses to questions I would ask questions, whose answers I hoped would mollify my desperation to one day leave behind the struggling-student lifestyle. I didn't like their answers then and I don't like them now. Prosperity may not be a top personal value for every psychologist, but for those who place it high on the scale, I champion it in a way that makes the world a better place by expanding access to care for more people, including those who systematically suffer from its lack.

This was the inaugural year of the Private and Group Practice Administration (PGPA) Committee. Long an idea that had been incubating in among a mélange of ill-formed ambitions in my mind, I finally decided to materialize this thing. I discovered that this nascent committee continued to take on a more defined shape with each meeting. Our initial two meetings were really exercises in answering questions from the uninitiated in practice administration. Group practice owners in attendance generously lent their expertise to those seeking guidance on some of the nuts and bolts of practice set up, such as the formation of legal and tax entities, insurance contracts and what qualifies as a business expense, among other topics. These are the rather banal but indispensable aspects of business/practice formation.  

While the PGPA will continue to be a forum for assisting SDPA members with these fundamental concerns, there are exciting times ahead. At our next meeting, we will liaise with a software developer who will learn about our "pain points" in practice administration and build software leveraging artificial intelligence to subserve the back-office functions that are so costly, complicated and confusing to manage due to the myriad miseries insurance companies visit upon us. The aim is to develop software that will support the clinician/practice owner, without having to hire a team of billers and other administrators, and to dismantle the fear many of us face at the prospect of “accepting insurance,” which indeed have become dirty words among our college.

Anyone interested is invited to attend.