Tip for Doctors & Medical students: You should read this book before signing any contract, joining a medical practice or starting a medical practice. This book is written to help doctors, medical residents, medical students, and physicians in private practice and academia avoid costly business mistakes in their post medical school career. It is uniquely written from the perspective of a successful physician entrepreneur. The book provides tips, steps, pearls, and pitfalls written in a concise manner. Busy doctors with little time can quickly access critical cost saving information when joining or starting a private practice.

Topics include everything from how to set up a practice, sign a contract with another group, hire another doctor, contract with insurance companies, understand health regulations including the HITECH stimulus act, how to qualify to receive stimulus funds, billing in the office, hiring and firing personnel, picking a location, obtaining hospital privileges, applying for the required licenses, electronic health records, practice management software, health technology in the office, how to protect your estate, liability issues,marketing and public relations, design of the medical office and more.

Also written for the physician entrepreneur, the book explains how to raise capital, term sheets, understanding venture capital, board of directors, incorporation election issues, how to understand financials, balance sheets, negotiations, hiring the management team, how to take an idea and turn it into an operating business, how to protect your intellectual property, copyrights, trademarks, patents, customer acquisition and how to deal with a business when things go wrong. The book covers much more and includes expert "stat consults" or opinions from corporate attorneys, intellectual property attorneys, board certified health care attorneys and estate attorneys.

This book was written for: Physicians about to enter private practice, ready to join a group practice, start a solo practice or already in private practice but want to improve his or her business acumen. Medical residents (physicians in training) and medical students. Physicians in academia and research. Any physician that wants to become an entrepreneur or improve their business acumen. Here are the ten most important reasons to read this book: 1) Physicians, medical students and medical residents will save money when entering private practice after reading this book. 2) Physicians, medical students and medical residents will avoid making the same costly mistakes the physician author made when he built his successful medical practice. 3) Includes legal opinions from leading expert attorneys on various relevant aspects of healthcare law and business law. These same opinions would cost thousands of dollars in legal fees. 4) Will teach physicians, medical students and medical residents about the most recent healthcare laws, requirements and licenses. 5) Provides easy to read, remember and access text boxes that contain pearls and pitfalls about the business and practice of medicine. 6) Provides a listing and explanation of the first 25 steps every doctor needs to take before entering private practice. 7) Will teach physicians, medical students and medical residents what to watch out for before signing any contract including employment contracts, insurance contracts, and vendor agreements. 8) Will teach physicians, medical students and medical residents how to be successful physician entrepreneurs. 9) Will teach physicians, medical students and medical residents about how to: incorporate their idea into a business, raise capital for their business and understand a term sheet. 10) Will teach doctors how to make money and be better in all aspects of business."

Steve Hacker is a neat guy. (If I thought he wasn’t, I would not have agreed to write this foreword!). In addition to being a real doc who sees patients in a private practice that he built from the ground up, he is a serial entrepreneur (unlike a serial killer who may dine on his victims, Steve can, as you will learn after reading the book, sometimes afford steak and lobster!) who has found a way to look at an unfilled niche in the business world and fill it in a profitable fashion. In contrast to many of us who can simply connect the dots, he can wring money out of the dots and the lines between them that, in this regard, makes him more like Steve Jobs than you or me. In fact, Steve Hacker goes one up on Steve Jobs, as the latter has never been known to effectively treat skin cancer (though an app for that is rumored to available in the next version of the iPhone OS). Despite the explosive growth of digital technologies, medical students, residents, and fellows still walk around with a soft-cover, often spiral-bound “manual” that is a concise, readable summary of the core techniques and knowledge of a particular specialty tucked into the pocket of their white coat. These white coats they wear have large pockets, as this little tome (I am assuming handbook sized or annotatable electronic, as a big, hardcover book such as Surgery of the Skin: Procedural Dermatology, by Robinson, Hanke, Siegel, and Fratila, does not fit in a pocket but should be bought anyway) will be a requirement for finishing trainees to have on hand, annotate, refer back to, and otherwise use as a road map to their first year in practice. Part I, in the voice of the author, allows the reader to envision the necessary activities for opening his or her own practice, while Part II is a guide for budding entrepreneurs. Part II covers victories and defeats in clear, concise tones that anyone can appreciate and empathize with. Hemingwayesque, concise, and practical, this book would be an ideal gift from department chairs to their senior residents at the start of their last year of training, or a personal purchase around the same time if the chairperson is too cheap to buy it for you. If you are reading this, turn the page and take the roller-coaster ride. Enjoy! Daniel Mark Siegel MD, MS (Management and Policy) Clinical Professor of Dermatology, SUNY Downstate American Academy of Dermatology President 2011

Steven M. Hacker, MD The Medical Entrepreneur After being selected as one of twelve people from a national applicant pool to enter medical school early through the prestigious Junior Honors Medical Program, I graduated from University of Florida medical school in 1989. I spent two years training in internal medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I completed my dermatology residency at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1994. By the time I had completed all my training, I had published over twenty peer-reviewed medical articles in medical journals. I co-authored several textbook chapters in clinical medicine textbooks. As of the writing of this book, I have incorporated ten different businesses. I started a Private Practice in Boca Raton, Florida, in 1994. Within ten years of starting my practice, I had a patient database of over twenty-five thousand patients. The practice is highly efficient and successful. At the end of 1996, I founded a company called Skinstore.com. I started this Internet company in a small corner of my house. I raised outside capital in an angel round from friends and family. This was at the beginning of the Internet boom. Skinstore was one of the first sites to sell physician-recommended skin care products (cosmeceuticals) online. Skinstore organically grew to one of the biggest online skincare sites. The company, under new management, has achieved cumulative lifetime revenue of over $200 million since inception. In 2004, five years before President Obama started talking about electronic personal health records, I created a personal health record company called PassportMD.com. PassportMD was selected by Medicare for its personal health record pilot program. It was recognized as one of the top personal health record companies in 2008 by the leading electronic medical record industry trade show. I negotiated marketing and partnership deals with Microsoft Healthvault, Holland America Lines and many other Fortune 500 companies as well as a nationally recognized celebrity spokesperson. I sold the company. Many people still use the award-winning health record software I created. In this book I share the lessons learned from both the mistakes and successes I experienced.