​​There’s a reason surgical practice mergers are popping up just as fast as cyber-security companies. Merging medical practices — surgical or otherwise — can save money, improve buying power to negotiate better deals with insurance companies and block time, and even improve patient care.

While surgery practice mergers can be a worthwhile endeavor, they are a complicated process.

When planning a merger, a practice’s brand, workflow, staffing, locations, and financial partnership agreements are all very important considerations. How these items are handled can significantly affect the success of your merger. 

Here are some important challenges and solutions for merging surgical practices to keep in mind.

How to Merge Medical Practices

1. Guard Your Practice’s Brand

You’ve built up a successful, growing surgical practice with a company name or specific surgeons’ names and profiles. So, it’s often best to focus on retaining the strengths of each business’ brand and building out what you already have rather than starting from scratch. 

Retaining your name is essential for your practice’s continued growth, maintaining various trust factors, such as:

• Brand recognition 
• Patient confidence
• Positive recommendations for your business

It also allows future patients to find your practice through existing URLs, online reviews, and word of mouth, too.

Together with your new partners, you’ll need to determine whether to maintain one of the practice’s brands or rebrand entirely. 

Once you’ve decided what you’ll call the new practice, let patients know as soon as possible and begin forming (or strengthening) a local and online presence. The more marketing you can do, the easier a large change in brand name, logo, and website will be. If you’d like to reduce marketing costs, consider a change that still reflects both prior practices’ names and core values. 

2. Update Your Website

It is important to remember that two (or more) practice brands now need to be combined. This means figuring out technicalities like a website.

You’ll want to retain the strengths of each business’s website, but it’s best to utilize the site with the strongest search engine optimization (SEO). Then, redirect the other practice’s website and links to the stronger (or new) website. 

Once the new or updated website is established, it needs to be marketed appropriately. Keeping popular and well-known surgeon names in the public eye (either through social media or local publications) will reassure current patients of the stability of the practices, and it’s also critical to remind your clientele that your customer and surgical care will only improve with merging physician practices.

3. Build New Workflow and Technology 

The changes in the technology implemented can greatly impact the workflow around surgery scheduling. Determining how the new practice will process and coordinate surgeries will be important.

This entails deciding which physical office(s) will be used for this task, what technology will be used for scheduling and workflow management, and whether patients will meet face-to-face with schedulers. 

If your practice doesn’t already have one, switching to an automated surgery coordination system can be a good opportunity. Platforms like Surgimate can streamline the scheduling process by syncing calendars from multiple locations. When merging two medical practices, establishing an optimal surgical scheduling system from the get-go will make for an efficiently run office moving forward.

It’s often a good opportunity to start afresh with this sort of workflow and iron out the details in advance to create an optimal process once the merger occurs

4. Smooth Out Staffing and Management

Figuring out technology is one thing, but staffing is often a more delicate one. A few issues need to be resolved in this regard, including who will lead the practice and who will sit on the leadership team.

Remember: Each practice brings with it its own team of executives, and there’s no assurance that each position will be maintained in the new practice. Be sure to reconcile this early on, as new positions may need to be created or restructured. More importantly, some staff members may be left out of a job and need to plan accordingly.

This applies to staff beyond the leadership team as well. If some positions will be made redundant, now’s the time to discuss how and when you plan to broach this with your staff.

Letting employees go can be difficult but crucial for a business’s continued success. Your office locations may also change, allowing some flexibility to move staff around if possible. That, too, should be clarified as part of your merger.

5. Clarify Employee Policies

These changes open up discussion on the work environment and benefits of the newly-merged practice. Employee satisfaction is a large part of any restructuring and an important one.

Be sure to clarify the sick leave, maternity and childcare leave, retirement contributions, and even paid salaries. This all needs to be streamlined in a way that is fair to employees and does not burn any bridges.

All of these changes need to be communicated to employees respectfully, and many discussions will need to occur with HR to ensure a happy team. 

Forward Planning is Key for a Successful Merger 

Merging with another medical practice can be a great way to grow your business and offer a wider variety of specialist services and surgeons. Buying or merging surgical practices can often facilitate swift growth and is widely desired by surgeons.

However, a merger must be carefully planned and implemented to be successful. Cover as many details in advance as possible and communicate as much as you can about the upcoming changes to your staff and clientele. This will leave everyone involved feeling confident about a smooth transition.