Practice With Us

Dr. Singh is a family physician practicing in a busy suburban clinic. He has been practicing for 15 years and is frustrated by a growing number of administrative tasks, which distract him from his practice and eat into his daily productivity. His assistant is away on maternity leave and his receptionist is dealing with a family emergency, and he is left scrambling to find replacement coverage. His phone is ringing, his patients are waiting in the exam rooms, and he has just used the last of his exam table paper. His landlord arrives and wants to discuss increases to his office rent, while frustrated patients keep asking how much longer they must wait.

As a result, Dr. Singh doesn’t have time to complete his charts, which have been piling up on his desk, and on his floor, forcing him to stay late into the night throughout the week to complete them. The following week, he receives his financial statements from his accountant. Although he is working harder than ever before, he doesn’t seem to be getting any further ahead. At this point, he has resigned himself to the reality that what he is doing is mostly administrative work, not what he loves and is trained to do: practice medicine.

Dr. Singh reaches out to the Medical Affairs team at Appletree to learn more about their business model. After meeting with management, he schedules several trial shifts with Appletree. He is amazed at the clean, quite environment, and is welcomed by staff, who had already prepared and triaged his patients before he arrived. The sense of relief that he no longer had to worry about staffing, inventory, rent, missing paper charts, payroll, and the incessant ringing of the phone was a huge relief. His patients were consistently triaged by well-trained staff, his consult requests and callbacks were fully automated (and completed), and private payments were collected. He also found the EMR intuitive and easy to use.

Realizing that he should have made the move years earlier, Dr. Singh decides to transfer his practice. The experienced Medical Affairs team helps coordinate the transfer of his charts, and answers all of his questions. After several months, with an increase in income and better work/life balance, he takes a long overdue vacation knowing that he has the support of a whole group of family physicians and specialists, who will care for his patients (and his mail) until he returns.

Dr. Li had recently graduated from University of Toronto. She was anxious to start family practice as soon as she received her Independent license from the CPSO. In her conversations with other UofT alum, she noted that many who were within their first few years of family practice were reporting long work hours and high burn out rates. It was her goal to ensure she could maintain a work-life balance while still achieving her desired income.

Appletree was able to accommodate her request for part-time practice hours. Dr. Li set a schedule of 18hr/week. It provided her comfort to know that her patients could receive continuity of care by seeing another Appletree physician when she was not available. She also had access to in-house specialists when she need to escalate a patient’s medical concern.

Through marketing efforts and network connects with a nearby University, Appletree was able to draw Dr. Li’s preferred demographic – Mandarin speaking international students. Within her first few months of practice, her patient volumes had reached her desired level of 6 patients per hour.

Dr. Chambers worked with a small clinic group in 1 clinic in the West End of Ottawa.  There was a problem with the processing of surgical equipment and other safety issues and the Public Health Unit shut the clinic down until they demonstrated following the Public Health Office Guidelines.

Within one year of moving into Appletree, he no longer had the stress of worry about Public Health Guidelines being followed and with the ‘Appletree Solutions’ mentioned, was able to increase his network of patients.

Dr. Anand worked in an office with one other colleague. She worked 40 hours per week at her office and rarely took any vacation. She had delayed a necessary surgery because she didn’t want her colleague to bear the burden of seeing all her patients while she was recovering. After joining Appletree with the intention of slowing down her pace and working 2 shifts per week (total of 12hrs per week) and trialing a few shifts, she booked her surgery knowing her patients would be cared for by her colleagues in the group. She returned to work 3 months later knowing her patients were cared for during her absence, and she is now comfortable booking vacations and enjoying semi-retirement.