A day as a Practice Manager
You're the person a clinic calls when anything that isn't medicine goes wrong. As a practice manager you run the staff, the schedule, the money and the building so the doctors can see patients. This guide follows a day in an outpatient medical practice with a handful of providers.
From unlocking the doors to the last claim
Checking the day before it starts
You open the schedule in the practice management system, whether that's athenahealth, eClinicalWorks or Epic, and look for gaps, double bookings and providers who are running late. A medical assistant has texted in sick, so you move the float MA to that pod and ask the front desk to warn patients about possible waits.
Standing huddle with the front and back office
It's a short meeting by the check-in window. You go over prior authorizations still pending, the new copay collection script, and a complaint from yesterday about a patient who waited too long in a room. You keep it moving. The providers want to start on time more than they want a speech.
The plan breaks
The phones go down. The VoIP vendor says it's an outage on their side, and patients can't reach you to reschedule or ask for refills. You get a backup cell number posted on the website and the patient portal, put a staff member on callbacks from the voicemail box, and keep the vendor on the line until service comes back. Nothing else on your list moves forward for the next hour.
Money, denials and the monthly numbers
You sit with the billing lead and go through the denial report and the aging report. A payer has started rejecting a certain visit code, so you pull a few charts, compare the coding, and decide whether it's a documentation problem or a payer problem. Then you check the deposit log in QuickBooks against what the system says was collected.
People problems and tomorrow's staffing
You meet with a receptionist about repeated late arrivals and write it up in the HR file. After that you approve timecards in ADP, answer an email from the owner physician about a new ultrasound lease, and look at tomorrow's schedule one more time before you lock up.
What makes the job heavy
You're in the middle of every disagreement in the building. Physicians want more slots, staff want fewer patients per hour, and the owners want the numbers to go up. You don't get to pick a side and walk away. The work also never stays finished: a clean billing month is followed by a payer policy change, and a fully staffed clinic loses a receptionist and a medical assistant in the same week. If you need a job where the list gets shorter by Friday, this isn't it. What keeps people in the role is that they can see their fingerprints on how the whole practice runs, from how fast the phone gets answered to whether the practice can afford a new provider.
Where practice managers come from
Up from the front desk or office manager seat
This is the most common route. You start at check-in or scheduling, become the lead or office manager, and pick up payroll, vendors and reporting until the owners hand you the whole practice. It works best in smaller, physician-owned offices where one person already does a bit of everything.
Over from billing and revenue cycle
Billing specialists and revenue cycle leads already understand claims, denials and payer contracts, which is the part of the job most new managers struggle with. You'll need to show you can supervise people and handle patient complaints, since billing work is often done away from the front office.
Across from clinical work
Some nurses, medical assistants and dental hygienists move into management after a long stretch on the floor. You bring credibility with clinical staff and a clear sense of patient flow. The gap to close is the business side, so a bookkeeping or healthcare management course helps. Larger groups sometimes like to see a degree in healthcare administration or a credential such as the Certified Medical Practice Executive from MGMA.
What Practice Manager postings ask for
Hiring the most
- EssilorLuxottica Group11
- LifeStance Health9
- Massgeneralbrigham7
- Alliance Animal Health6
- Amerivet5
Remote
9% of openings are fully remote.
Posted pay
$74,291 – $97,079
Typical range in the 20 of the newest 60 postings that list pay.
Questions people ask
Do you need a license to be a practice manager?
No state license is required for the manager role itself. You do need to know the rules the practice works under, such as HIPAA privacy rules, OSHA safety requirements and your state's rules for clinical staff, and those vary by state. Credentials like the CMPE are optional but show up in postings for larger groups.
Is a practice manager the same as an office manager?
The titles overlap, and small offices use them loosely. An office manager usually runs the front office and daily operations. A practice manager tends to own the finances, payer relationships, hiring and long-term decisions as well, and often reports straight to the owners or a physician board.
What decides how much a practice manager earns?
The page shows the typical range next to this guide. Where you land depends on the size of the practice, the specialty, whether you manage more than one location, and how much of the revenue cycle you run yourself. Specialty groups with high-cost procedures often pay more than primary care.
248 Practice Manager jobs are open today
HeroApply applies to them for you, so you can keep doing the job you have.