Mohit Nanda, MD

What is Your Whatever? Building a Practice that You Enjoy

Welcome to what I hope will be an ongoing forum of physician-to-physician articles sharing our best wisdom. The medical staff of Martha Jefferson Hospital is diverse and rapidly growing. I look forward to learning many things from the personal experiences of our own doctors. It is with these hopes, and no specific format to constrain us, that we began with Dr. Laub’s experience as a physician and a patient. In subsequent issues, I hope to enlist many of you to write, not about the latest medical advances, but about being busy physicians. How our lives are intricately related to our families, colleagues and patients. How the practice of medicine in Charlottesville has changed over the years. And perhaps what it means to be part of the Martha Jefferson physician “family.” Along the way, maybe our collective experiences can help us transcend the daily rigors of our profession.

My personal experience of moving to Charlottesville three and a half years ago serves as an interesting example of how Martha Jefferson medical staff is growing dramatically with the addition of more physicians in more subspecialties than could have been envisioned just a few years ago. Fueled by the prospect of a beautiful, new state-of-the-art facility as well as colleagues and an administration eager to embrace growth, I definitely felt the excitement here when we contemplated leaving Southern California.The risks of leaving an existing partnership and all that was familiar seemed to be high, but the chance to lead life on my own terms was—as the MasterCard ads would say—priceless. I had little prior experience with managing a medical practice or any experience whatsoever with billing. In retrospect, however, these issues have not been as important as other factors in building and creating a patient-centric practice, the kind of practice I had always hoped to have.

Over a lifetime, many things can distract us from our original starry-eyed aspirations of being an excellent doctor. This, in turn, makes it difficult to take care of patients well. Coming to Charlottesville was at least partly precipitated by my realization that I was not enjoying my professional practice as much as I would have liked. Managed care created an artificial barrier to access. I was spending less time with patients and more time on the road. Because my father always used to tell me that “everyone gets better at something they enjoy,” I set out to create an environment where I could provide better patient care and enjoy my workday. continued ...