Pterion · About
It started with our own clinic.
Pterion is physician-led. It began with a physician trying to fix what was inefficient in our own clinics: software that could not be changed, and staff hours going to the same administrative tasks every day.
Assess Design Build Operate
Where it started
The first problems were ours.
Old software that did what its vendor decided, not what the clinic needed. A front desk typing the same patient into three systems. Results, referrals and forms sorted by hand, every day, by people hired to do more than that.
We started looking for ways to give that time back. Some of it was found in ordinary software written for the way the clinic actually worked; some in automating around systems that could not be changed; some in deciding not to build at all. Every hour taken off a repetitive task was an hour the office no longer paid for twice.
The other return was harder to count. Less of the day on administration meant more of it on medicine, on staff, and on the parts of running a clinic we had chosen. That balance is what we are driven to improve: in our own clinics first, and now in others.
What we believe
- Physicians should own and lead their clinics.
Independent, clinician-owned clinics can run well: efficiently, profitably, and with the owner still enjoying the work. We do not think corporate medicine should be the one deciding what a physician-owned clinic can do.
- Teaching is part of the work.
The founder is a physician who cares about mentorship, and who has shown other physicians how to run an office that is efficient, profitable and a good place to work. Pterion is that mentorship, offered as a firm.
- Nobody should have to know where to start.
Most physician owners were never taught to run a business, and few have a technical background. That is not a reason to sell. It is the reason we exist: to bring the systems, the teaching and the technology to owners who want to keep leading.
- Time is the clinic’s money.
Hours spent on repetitive administration are paid for twice: once in wages, and again in what the clinic could not do instead. The hours a system gives back are the first thing we look at.
Physician-led, in practice
A physician leads every engagement, and the clinics the firm learned in are still running. Every system we sell was built there first and is described in the case studies without names, without patient data, and without a number we did not measure.
We build the governance artefacts a clinic’s own medical director signs. We do not take directorships and we do not sign directives; the clinic’s physician stays the clinic’s physician.
We want the same thing for every physician owner that we wanted for ourselves: an office that is efficient, profitable, and a good place to work, run by the person whose name is on the door.
Start with an assessment No obligation · a diagnosis first
Four systems, in this order
- 01 Clinical Directorship support, directives, protocols, incident review Physician-led
- 02 Operations Flow, scheduling, staffing, revenue, overhead Front desk
- 03 Technology Websites, custom software, data, security Build
- 04 Compliance OHPIP, facility permits, policies, QA, PHIPA privacy, AODA CPSO · RCDSO
We have run the front desk we are selling the fix for.
Being a clinician is hard enough. Running the business around it is not taught in professional school, and the field is corporatizing around the owners who learned it the hard way.
We exist to help clinician-owned clinics stay independent and succeed: to make the operation efficient, to teach what we had to learn ourselves, and to give owners back the part of the work they love.
an assessment.
No obligation · a diagnosis of the problem and what can be done about it · every scope quoted on its own