Starting a Midwifery Birth Center Practice

Midwifery practices are booming in United States. Covid-19 has really accelerated the demand and midwives are trying to keep up with the demands. Having a birth center for your already established home birth practice would be a great transition to serve more families. The challenge with a home birth practice is the radius a midwife serves and the balancing act of how many clients to take with increasing chances of “needing to be in two places at once.” A birth center will help decrease the anxiety for midwives by having a central location for births versus large birth radius to drive to. The cleaning standards can be controlled better than a home setting by birth team. There are many women wanting an out of hospital birth, but can’t do it at that home for one reason or another (live with parents, have many other children at home, and client’s comfort level).

Birth centers are really going to increase in numbers through the United States over the next five years. Reimbursement rates and state regulations will be more conducive to midwifery’s cost effective health care option for birth. Health care system is on the brink of collapse with Covid-19 and families are looking for a way to have a peaceful, safe birth minutes from a hospital setting. Birth centers will be filling that void in our current system in leaps and bounds. Midwives will need to plan, prep, and take business courses to make successful birth center practices.

There is so much that midwifery training does provide for clinical care, but nothing about business ownership. Learning by “hard knocks” is rough and causes high burnout rates. Learn from experts that have ran successful midwifery practices for years. Why remake tools, templates, and policies that other midwifery practices have already made. Utilize your midwifery community to accelerate everyone’s business success. Birth center’s have a unique business plan compared to home birth and hospital practices. There is billing for a facility as well as professional services. The operating regulations for a birth center (fluctuates with each state) aren’t present with other birth locations.

The initial funding costs for a birth center is astronomically higher than a home birth or hospital midwifery practice. Knowing if you should buy, lease, or build are vital decisions to make in the beginning that will have lasting effect on your business’ success. Get a midwifery business mentor, hire our consultants, and take business courses. We have a great online birth center course that goes into over eight hours of detail about business side of birth center practice ownership. Knowledge is power and learning from other people’s mistakes and “shortcuts” will save you thousands of dollars and time making your birth center profitable!