This tool asks one question: what does this practice model actually require to be sustainable, clinically manageable, and financially viable? The status banner, runway chart, and scenario table evaluate revenue after coverage against a revenue requirement you build from your own numbers. That requirement comes from your monthly personal income goal, your estimated tax rate, your confirmed business costs, and an allowance for payment processing. When you model backup provider coverage, those costs are added directly to your gross revenue target without affecting the processing calculation.
This is a thinking tool, not a financial plan or a schedule. The goal is not to find the right answer. It is to form your own reactions to what the numbers show when you change inputs.
At the top of the model, open the "How this model works" collapsible. It explains every assumption and simplification the model makes. Two minutes well spent before you start.
Click through the five preset buttons in order. Each one loads a complete set of assumptions: schedule, intake slots, price, and buffer. Watch how the metric cards and status banner respond as you move from one to the next.
After clicking through the presets, look at the six metric cards directly below. They are the fastest way to read what each preset produces.
These update simultaneously as you move any slider. Focus here first before looking at anything else.
Open the Revenue Requirement section below the status banner. Enter your monthly personal income goal: what you need to land in your personal account each month after setting aside for taxes. Business costs are entered separately below. The model builds your revenue requirement around this number.
Set the tax rate slider. It defaults to 28%, a reasonable combined estimate for self-employment and income tax. Refine with a CPA later once the practice is operational.
The requirement card shows two related numbers: the required revenue after coverage, and the gross revenue target including your modeled coverage cost. The status banner, runway chart, and scenario table all compare revenue after coverage against the after-coverage requirement. The Est. Take-Home card separately compares your estimated take-home against your personal income goal directly.
Inside Revenue Requirement, open Business Overhead. Enter confirmed monthly costs: EHR, malpractice insurance, HIPAA compliance, accounting, phone, and website. EHR is pre-filled at $313 as a placeholder based on current research. Everything else starts at $0. As real quotes come in, update each line and watch the revenue requirement adjust. Payment processing is calculated separately based on your actual revenue and is not something you enter manually.
Below the sliders, a horizontal bar breaks down your available hours into five pools: intake sessions including admin time (green), established patient sessions (blue), admin time for established visits (amber), urgency buffer slots (gray), and unused capacity (light gray). Look at this before revenue. Moving the intake slots slider grows the green segment and visibly reduces the blue. That trade-off is the whole point of the bar.
Move the admin-per-visit slider and watch the bar shift. At 5 minutes, you get more patient slots but very little documentation time. At 15 or 20 minutes, admin grows and capacity drops. There is no right answer. It depends on your EHR and how quickly you can chart after a session.
Inside the Capacity Allocation card, open Week Schedule View. Your model becomes a time-block calendar. Green blocks are 60-minute new patient intake sessions. Blue blocks are 30-minute established patient sessions. Amber blocks that follow each session are documentation and admin time. Light blue blocks are urgency buffer slots held for urgent needs and clinical overflow. If the schedule runs longer than your modeled workday, a warning appears on the section label.
Move the intake slots slider with the grid open. Green intake blocks appear and disappear in real time, and the blue established patient blocks adjust around them. Move the admin slider and watch the amber blocks grow and shrink. The summary line above the grid shows the authoritative weekly counts: intake slots, established patient slots, and days.
The urgency buffer serves two purposes. The first is planned: holding capacity for a patient in crisis who needs to be seen this week rather than scheduled out. The second is situational: absorbing the occasional established patient who arrives more distressed than expected and needs more time than the 30-minute slot allows. You cannot plan for the second case, but you can make sure the schedule has room for it.
The Access and Availability Pressure card tells you whether your current buffer is sufficient and explains what the number means for your schedule. The model always ensures the buffer meets a minimum safe threshold, even when the slider percentage would produce fewer slots. The access card will tell you the result clearly.
Lowering the buffer from 20% to 15% may free up one additional established patient session per week while still keeping the buffer at a clinically safe level. The access card confirms whether that is the case for your current schedule. If it shows green, the change is safe. If it shows amber, the buffer needs attention before that session is added.
Two sliders model backup provider cost: 1099 NP day rate and days per month needing coverage. If you do not have a day rate yet, try $400 to $600 as a starting range and see how sensitive the model is. For vacation planning, two weeks off per year is roughly 8 to 10 workdays, which averages to about 1 coverage day per month. Add more to account for sick time, CME days, or personal days.
Watch the "After coverage" figure, the status banner, and the Est. Take-Home card as you adjust these sliders. A preset that shows green with no coverage cost can flip to amber once you subtract realistic coverage costs. The status banner evaluates revenue after coverage, not gross revenue alone.
Postpartum care is time-limited. Patients graduate. You need a steady flow of new patients to keep the roster full. Three sliders control this: average patient duration (how many months they stay in active care), new starts per month (how many new patients you accept), and active patients at launch (how many patients you are starting with, spread across the average care duration).
As a rough steady-state estimate, multiply new starts per month by average duration. The model caps that number at your maximum active patient capacity. If the steady-state panel is below your capacity target, you need more new starts per month, more intake slots, or longer average duration.
The intake slots slider sets how many 60-minute new patient evaluations you hold per week. The new starts per month slider is automatically capped at your intake capacity. At 2 intake slots per week, the ceiling is 8 new starts per month. If you drop intake slots to zero to temporarily close the practice to new patients, the tool remembers your previous settings and restores them when intake capacity returns.
If active patients at launch is set above the model's capacity, the runway caps the launch panel at the modeled capacity and shows a warning. This keeps the ramp from starting with more patients than the schedule can actually carry.
Below the sliders, the steady state card shows three figures: how many patients the current settings support at steady state, how many you will need to replace per month at full capacity, and whether your intake capacity covers that replacement rate. If the intake capacity figure shows in red, your current intake slots are not enough to sustain a full panel long-term.
The 6-month runway chart shows how the patient panel grows from launch, calculated as whole patients arriving and graduating over time. Bar colors: blue means the month meets the revenue requirement after coverage, amber means it is above the 70% capacity benchmark but below the requirement, red means below the benchmark. The note below the chart tells you if and when the requirement is hit within six months.
After exploring presets, move the subscription price slider on its own. Price is the highest-impact lever in the model. Hours and patient count move slowly. Price moves the whole picture instantly.
Private-pay psychiatry typically runs $200 to $350 per 30-minute session. At every-other-week visits, a patient paying $275 per session spends about $596 a month. At $550 a month, your subscription equals about $254 per session. If your subscription is $350 per month, you are charging about $162 per session. The gap between your number and traditional per-session rates is a decision worth making consciously, with eyes open to what it means for both sustainability and patient access.
At the bottom of the model, a comparison table shows your current settings as the first row (highlighted in light blue) and five fixed reference rows below a divider. Each row shows hours per week, follow-up slots per week, active patients, subscription price, per-session equivalent, monthly revenue, and a status pill. The follow-up slots column reflects established patient sessions only. Intake slots are modeled separately.
When coverage is modeled, each revenue cell splits into a gross figure and an after-coverage line. Status pills evaluate every row against the after-coverage revenue requirement. A preset that shows green with no coverage may flip to amber once you add a realistic backup provider cost.
At the bottom of the model, click Generate AI Consultation Brief once you have set your income goal. It opens a structured summary of your current scenario: every input, every output, the six-month ramp, and specific questions for an AI assistant to address. Copy and paste into any AI tool for a plain-English interpretation of what your scenario actually means.