Procedures in setting up clinic. Part 2

After all the mundane stuff, here comes the exciting part, looking for an space for the clinic. First we need to decide on the layout of the clinic. There are a few no frills version we can look into.

One Room
This is where the exam table, the office is in one room and without a waiting room. Patient would have to wait outside the clinic at the corridor. This would be the cheapest solution since this combination rarely need to exceed 250 sq of space. However, whether this type of setting would be appealing to your patient would have to be determine by you as a acupuncturist practitioner.

Two Room
This is where the office is double up as waiting room and the patient would have a private room during treatment. However during treatment when the acupuncturist is putting needles into the patient, the office/waiting room is vulnerable, easily subjected to theft.

Three Rooms
An office, a waiting room and patient room.This would be an ideal compare to the previous two layout but it would come with a higher price since the sq footage would need to be bigger, 450 sq of space minimum.

An example of a 4 room floor plan

Of course, as your practice grow you can increase the number of rooms, add a sink or even a restroom. If you need to visualize how you clinic looks to you, go Floor Planner, here you can sign in with your google account, start visualizing and designing the layout of your clinic.

Next, you would need to determine if you want your clinic to be located at a retail strip, having a store front or located within an office building. Clinic having a store front is good since it can attract walk-ins patients. The disadvantages are the rent tends to be very high, 1 to 2 times higher than an office building rent for the same square footage. More often than not, it is extremely difficult to find a store front space that is less than 1000 sq feet, which would significantly drive up the cost. Thirdly, a store front clinic also means that you have to constantly be at the clinic even if there is no patient appointment on that day.

Looking for a clinic location can be easily done through internet. Loopnet, Commercial Gateway and Showcase are some of the websites you can look for commercial properties. Alternatively, you can look for doctors, dentist, chiropractors and see if they are willing to rent out a room for you. In this case, you can save quite a huge chucks of rent, utilized the existing facilities and have some referral patient from the practitioner you are subleasing.

Once you have found a space for your clinic, beware that the sq footage is usually smaller than what is written in the contract. If the contract has written 500 sq, the size of the space is usually about 8 to 10% less, this is to cater for the hallway, escalator and common area. This is usually not properly conveyed to the tenant but the landlord agent.

Once you have the contract on hand, it would be advisable to ask a commercial property lawyer to look through, to renegotiate some of the terms and conditions that are not favorable to you. A cheaper avenue of doing this is to go online and gather some commercial property contracts, spend sometime to compare the terms and conditions, to determine what is the industry standard. When you start making changes to the contract, use the track changes functions to monitor those terms that you have change so that it can be easily conveyed to the landlord.

Usually the price per sq is not easily negotiable but you can usually as the landlord to allow early move in or to give 1 to 2 month of free rent.

After searching for a space, do not rush into signing the contract. Take the time to think through the location of the clinic, the accessibility and parking. Location of the clinic would be better if it is near the highway compare to one that is located at a local road far from the highway. Since we are in healthcare business, the patient accessibility is important, especially for wheel chair bound patient. Third, parking convenience for the patient. You have to determine if parking is ample for the patient,  parking cost is bear by the patient, or free parking.