Solo practice as a radiologist

[tooty]

How does solo practice work? I hear it being done in rural settings but I know nothing more. Anyone have insight on this? I thought you pretty much have to join a group when you get out of residency.

[Lactic Folly]

I imagine it would be tough to do solo practice when starting out.. no one to provide a second look at tough cases, plus you would have to find someone to cover you whenever you wanted to go away.

[Ian Wong]

I think it would be really tough to do. The vast majority of graduates I know, heck, all of them, in both Canada and the US, have joined group practices, either in academics or in private practice.

 

Radiology is a field that really lends itself to group practice. It's much easier to hand off cases in a shift-work fashion because there's little to no continuity of care, as there would be if you were an internist or a surgeon. As well, it's so difficult to stay on the leading edge of imaging for one radiology subspecialty, let alone all of them. Given that probably greater than 50% of radiology graduates do fellowships, chances are good that in a group, you'll have a subspecialty fellowship-trained colleague to help out with the tough cases.

 

Cost-sharing is another area where having a group can really help out. Many groups now have imaging centers outside of the hospital, which allows them to control their imaging to a greater degree. Having these outside centers allows them to perform imaging studies without the hurdles of doing it in the inpatient setting, where the hospital hires the employees and sets the work schedules. It's the same reason why surgeons have tried in several provinces to create private surgery-centers. A solo radiologist would never have enough capital to fund and establish an imaging center, while a group of radiologists could easily do so.

 

Finally, there's the problem of availability. This is an issue faced by any solo specialist, which would be the on-call and vacation coverage. If you are the only radiologist in town, you will have serious challenges in making yourself available whenever emergencies arise as well as ensuring that the community has coverage available when you are away on vacation.

 

In short, I've never seen a recent radiology graduate go into a solo practice job. I think those individuals are few and far between, and you'd likely need to be practicing in a pretty underserved or rural area to see this commonly.

 

If you really don't want to be involved in a group, an alternative would be to do teleradiology, where you could function in an eat-what-you-kill fashion. Even then, it's likely that you would sign on with one of the big teleradiology companies such as Virtual Radiologic, as they have all the equipment and credentialling staff on board already. From there, you work for them, but your income depends solely on the volume of reads you produce for them.

 

Ian