News
Practice viability: ‘It’s crucial for the health of the country’
At a time of unprecedented change, GPs are reminded of a suite of practical tools available to help create successful practices.
Included in the RACGP’s toolkit is the Mixed Billing Guide and Billing Calculator.
From Medicare rebates to staff recruitment, technology, burnout, and red tape – running a general practice is a complicated business.
At a time when practice viability is more important than ever, the RACGP is reminding specialist GPs and practice owners of its suite of practical tools designed to help navigate that complexity.
In a three-part series, the college will highlight these tools, what they are designed for, and how they can help – included in the RACGP’s toolkit is its Mixed Billing Guide and Billing Calculator.
Dr Ken McCroary, a GP in south-west Sydney and RACGP Business Viability Working Group member, says this knowledge is vital for GPs to maintain healthy practices.
‘It’s crucial, not just for the bottom line about businesses and our careers and livelihood, it’s crucial for the health of the country,’ he told newsGP.
‘Without a viable quality primary care sector led by general practice, we know from data all around the world that we die younger, we spend more time in hospital, and we collect more diseases leading to a poorer quality of life.’
The Billing Calculator is an online tool designed to help GPs, and their practice meet their financial goals and better understand how practice billing may affect income and lifestyle.
Using the tool, GPs can enter their desired annual income and determine factors to help them achieve this, including number of services they would need to bill to meet that goal.
‘Experimenting with different calculations will help you to determine how many sessions, individual consultations and thus the number of clinical staff your practice will need to meet your ideal financial goal,’ the RACGP website explains.
Inputs into the calculator include:
- desired annual income
- service fee percentage
- desired number of clinical sessions per week
- desired average length of clinical session
- average number of patient visits per hour
- desired number of weeks absent from practice per year
- non-clinical time per week.
By changing these inputs, GPs can determine:
- annual gross billings required
- average number of patient visits per year
- average fee required per patient
- average hourly billing required to meet desired income.
Monthly billings can also be determined, with changeable inputs including level A (Item 3), level B (Item 23), level C (Item 36), level D (Item 44), GPMP (Item 721), TCA (Item 723), and GPMP/TCA review (Item 732).
‘It’s very difficult to get a good sense of what to do without a calculator set up like this, so I think it’s a very good, very accessible tool,’ says Dr Michael Bonning, Chair of the Business Viability Working Group.
‘You can make decisions about how you structure how many level As, how many level Bs, how many level Cs, how much chronic disease management [items] you think you’ll do.
‘More than anything else, it’s about educating yourself as a specialist GP, about the kind of practitioner you want to be and how you want to deliver your care – it opens up thinking.’
Meanwhile, the RACGP resource ‘
A guide to introducing mixed billing in your practice’ is aimed at helping GPs who are considering a mixed billing model to improve the viability of their practice and ‘generate additional income to cover rising operating costs’.
The guide covers the RACGP’s position on billing, as well as:
- Medicare billing rules
- explaining Medicare to patients
- deciding which patients to privately bill
- recommended fees
- advice for independent contractors
- letting patients know about changes to your billing model
- Medicare Safety Nets
- other strategies to keep your practice sustainable.
‘There is a guide to how you think about introducing mixed billing in your practice, and that’s a discussion that we think more practices are going to have at the moment,’ Dr Bonning told
newsGP.
‘How do we make sure that the way in which we do mixed billing is accepted by our whole team but also is understood and accepted by our community.’
Ultimately, the viability of general practice is something Dr Bonning says ‘everyone has to think about’ in terms of why or why not they are achieving what they want in their practice.
‘Thinking about how do I want to run my practice? How do I want to make it functional, viable, successful over an extended period of time?,’ he said.
‘Always the top line is providing the best care for my patients and doing that means financial viability is really important.’
For those seeking further information on practice viability, the RACGP Practice Owners Conference 2025 will take place at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on 24–25 May.
Register online.
Log in below to join the conversation.
billing Medicare Practice Owners conference practice viability
newsGP weekly poll
As a GP, would you benefit from further education about identifying and supporting patients impacted by intimate partner violence?