Find an Innovative Place for Your Practice
Moving to a commercial location can boost your practice’s profile while increasing convenience for patients. Here’s how to determine if a retail space is right for your practice.
When it comes to location, your obligations as a doctor and your ambitions as a business owner needn’t be mutually exclusive. Opening a practice in a shopping center is a good way to both market your business and improve accessibility for patients.
Shopping centers often have good parking, which helps patients access your office more easily, says David Sloane, a professor in the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and co-author of Medicine Moves to the Mall. In his book, which is co-authored by Beverlie Conant Sloane, he explores the integration of a shopping center’s spaciousness and open design with technology and scientific innovation. Recently, he notes, the accessibility and convenience of shopping centers and roadside clinics have invited people to shop for their health-related services in the increasingly commercialized medical system. In addition to easy access and parking, he says that patients also can benefit from the convenience of nearby stores. Having the ability to run errands after a visit to the doctor is a perk that patients won’t find at every physician’s office.
Choosing the right commercial location can dramatically increase your practice’s exposure because most retail spaces allow for more foot traffic than stand-alone locations.
Boost your profile
Improving your practice’s image is good for business, but it’s important to target your clientele. Ask yourself, “Is this where my target market is going to shop?” Do your homework by asking surrounding business owners about their experiences.
Look for locations near other health care providers or retailers who cater to your target demographic. For example, if your practice has a lot of elderly patients, you may want to move next to an ergonomic furniture store. If you’re targeting the upwardly mobile, lifestyle centers with their mix of retail, housing and medical offices are a good option.
Also consider the shopping center as a whole. Large, fading malls may offer better deals on your lease, but that can be risky. “For a physician to move into a mall that’s really struggling, it’s fraught with dangers,” Sloane says. Small practices can have a big impact on smaller shopping centers and strip malls, but it would take a large medical facility to resurrect a big shopping center.
Finding the right fit
The open, loft-like space of retail locations can easily be adapted to the needs of a medical practice, says Richard Haines, president of Medical Design International, a Norcross, Ga.-based medical planning, productivity and design firm.
Haines offers the following considerations before securing a retail space:
- Can the building’s mechanical systems accommodate multiple thermostats, so patient rooms can be kept at warmer temperatures?
- Was the building constructed to limit the migration of sound to ensure privacy?
- Is there a back door, so patients aren’t keeping tabs on your comings and goings?
- Will the terms of your lease be long enough to justify the cost of improvements?
- Will the square footage and dimensions fit your needs?
- What kind of signage and visibility will you have?
- “The efficient design in medicine is ergonomically tight,” Haines says. “The big, open spaces available in retail environments often allow for this type of design.”
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