Creating a Women’s Health Clinic as Your Midwifery Business

January 26, 2022

Creating a women’s health clinic as a midwife can have its challenges. Do you love serving women, but can’t stand being up all night for a birth anymore? “With women” means any aspect of a women’s life. It isn’t just for pregnancy adn birth. So many women are having the trouble of finding a good women’s health care provider. Create a local clinic that fills those needs and make office hours on your timeline of life. Do you want to work 10hr a week? Or Monday through Friday 9-5pm with no call, weekends, or holiday availability?

There are times in life when being available unexpected can be hard like having a young family, limited babysitting options for a single mother, or nearing retirement and back can’t handle bending for another birth. Whatever your reason is women deserve to have all aspects of their lives taken care of. Create a women’s health clinic that fills those needs. Your midwife business could specialize in sexual health, pelvic floor therapy, urinary incontinence, primary care, well women exams, breast checks, STD screenings, or preconception counseling.

I needed for a while a break from everyone knowing my cell number, needing to skip kid’s baseball games, and decrease anxiety from unpredictability of home birth call coverage. Transitioning to a women’s health clinic made perfect sense. Insurance billing was much easier with simple office visit codes than maternity codes. Outsourcing with a larger already established health clinic allowed my to use their administration staff and create a commission arrangement for room rental. I covered my own supplies and billing EMR system, they covered marketing and administration support staff. It was simple and created more of a life balance.

The possibilities are endless to what you can create as a midwife business. My whole goal of this website and blog postings is to inspire creativity and help each midwife fulfill her professional dreams where ever life takes you. What may work today might not make sense in ten years. Evolve with your passion, life needs, and skill set. Always continue to grow and create relationships with health care community. Opportunities will open up to you that didn’t even think were possible.

Creating a women’s health clinic as a midwife can have its challenges. Most people in my area aren’t familiar with a midwife let alone full scope of a midwife’s services. My marketing budget is much higher when advertising a women’s health clinic ran by a midwife. Most people see midwife and assume the practice only offers care for pregnant women wanting a home birth. Participating in lots of expos, conferences, local events to get awareness of my business mission and professional scope takes time.

Insurance credentialing was challenging with some carriers since most midwives do birth coverage. Many needed a collaborating physician and recognition of hospital transport relationship even though I wasn’t doing any of those services with my midwife practice. It took extensive appeals and meetings to get customized insurance credentialing requests to avoid those aspects not warranted.

Even getting physician collaborations were difficult when I was only doing gynecological services. There wasn’t a perceived need for collaboration agreements like for obstetrical services. It took extensive education to discuss possible scenarios where transfers of care still needed to be planned in the office setting.

I have spent more time networking with other specialties in medicine than OB when starting my women’s health clinic. The patients you serve will need referrals to physical therapy, oncology, pain clinics, gastroenterology, and diabetes counseling. What if you have a women that had an abnormal pap smear and needed a colposcopy. What if mammogram came back with suspicious breast lump? I have spent more time networking with other specialties in medicine than OB when starting my women’s health clinic. The patients you serve will need referrals to physical therapy, oncology, pain clinics, gastroenterology, and diabetes counseling.

It was easier to make fee schedules and budgets for a women’s health clinic. I knew which insurance plans I was accepting, which specific services I was offering, and my overhead budget was fraction of costs just doing office side. Malpractice insurance costs goes down drastically (went from $30,000 year to $3,000). I collected co-payments and knew if insurance would cover this specific visit requested with a click of the button in EMR system. With maternity care, I had so many variables with billing insurance plans and delayed payments decreased patient collections. With office visit, claims go out same day as visit and processed within a couple weeks. If patient didn’t pay, I was out a $100 versus thousands with birth charges.

When I am seeing women for preventative or simple problem visits, there isn’t so much emotional attachment to the visits. During pregnancy and birth, there is so much more pressure on affecting women’s life experience. She will always remember her birth experience, but not necessarily the annual exam with pap smear in 2017. I was in a part of my professional career that I didn’t want to be a large part of a women’s birth experience.

I like helping with weight loss, smoking cessation, breast check, and vaginal infection treatment. Find what aspect of midwifery makes you happy and create a business around it. If you want to consult legal cases, you can do that as a midwife. If you want to hold a women’s hand during labor and support her bringing a life into this world, do your dream. Each midwife business has pros and cons to it. Create a well written business plan outline your short term and long term goals for the practice. It will help you make a successful business that you will want to continue to be part of!