Practice Manager

How to hire a Practice Manager for your practice

Before you write the job posting, settle three framing questions. They determine which profile you actually need and help you avoid the most common scope mistakes in German medical and dental practices.

Question 1: Practice Manager, lead MFA or commercial practice director? The three roles partly overlap but are not equivalent. A lead MFA leads the MFA team operationally (shift plan, onboarding, material ordering) and works in a medical-assisting capacity. A commercial practice director steers several practices or an MVZ from a management function, often with controlling, multi-location responsibility and a direct reporting line to owners or operators. The Practice Manager sits in between: she/he steers the single practice or a small Berufsausübungs-Gemeinschaft (joint practice partnership) completely (appointments across several physicians / practitioners, KV billing, QM, DSGVO, personnel, external contracts, patient communication), without assisting medically and without steering multiple locations. Blending the three in one ad attracts poorly matched applications. Make the function precise in the title itself: Praxismanager:in (m/w/d), not “experienced MFA with responsibility”, which says nothing.

Question 2: What exact scope? Across practices the scope of a Practice Manager varies considerably: pure office and reception steering, with or without KV billing and GOÄ/EBM plausibility checks, with or without QM officer duties, with or without KIM and eAU implementation, with or without staff leadership of 4-15 MFAs or ZFAs. List the topics covered explicitly in the ad. A Practice Manager without KV billing experience needs 6-12 months of support if that part is to be carried; one without QM officer experience exposes the practice to immediate risk at KV and public-health-office spot checks. Name the practice management system in use (Medistar, T2med, CGM Albis, Tomedo, Dampsoft, Z1) and the specialty context (general medicine, dentistry, orthodontics, ophthalmology, dermatology, MVZ).

Question 3: What practice size and specialty? A Practice Manager who has steered a single practice with 1 physician / practitioner and 4 MFAs works differently than someone who has steered an MVZ with 6 physicians / practitioners and 15 MFAs. Rituals, cadence, billing volume and staff leadership differ. Look for a profile whose previous practice size is at most 2x smaller or larger than yours; larger gaps require a real re-adaptation. The specialty is just as relevant: GOÄ logic, private-pay share, emergency volume and QM obligations differ considerably between general medicine, dentistry and surgical fields. In the German market the full-time role is justified from 2 physicians / practitioners and 6-8 MFAs; for single practices with 1 physician / practitioner and 3-4 MFAs, a lead MFA with Practice Manager training is usually enough.

If the three answers converge on a full-time Practice Manager for a practice with 2-6 physicians / practitioners and 6-15 MFAs or ZFAs (and not on a lead MFA or a commercial practice director), see the ready-to-use template on the Job description tab.