The Silence: Opening and Reopening My Clinic to an Empty Waiting Room

In the beginning

I first opened the doors of Bloomfield Medical Clinic in February 2021. A week later, the snow apocalypse took out my office building. I spent the next three months paying full rent on a building I couldn’t use while my landlord gutted and renovated it. That was the start of Private Practice for me — before I’d even seen my first real patient.

Bloomfield Medical Clinic is a cash-based practice. I didn’t have an insurance panel feeding me patients, a hospital system behind me, or a marketing budget. It was me, a lease, and a plan I believed in — until the plan met reality.

I officially reopened on May 1st, 2021, and got straight back to setting things up: furniture and supplies from Amazon, hours spent binging podcasts and blogs from other physicians in private practice. And then I waited. I mean I really waited — for patients to walk through a door I’d worked so hard to open.

I saw 1 patient in the entire month of May. In June, I saw 2. Needless to say, I was discouraged. Personal circumstances meant picking up locum shifts wasn’t really an option, so instead I spent my days researching — looking for ways to attract patients, services I could add, and honestly, trying to remember why I’d opened this clinic in the first place. The silence was very loud.

What pulled me out of that stretch wasn’t a marketing breakthrough. It was a job posting. I applied for an obesity telemedicine gig with a new startup, got the position, and got to work. Unlike an established platform, this startup needed to run its clinical operations through my own clinic infrastructure — my phone line, my fax, my EMR. I built treatment protocols from scratch, created intake forms, found subscription services, set up lab accounts. It was messy. It was also the busiest and most productive I’d felt since reopening.

In July 2021, I saw 6 patients and hired my first staff member — an amazing virtual assistant — to help me sort through the mess. My monthly overhead, without taking a salary for myself, came to $5,800. My income that month was $3,066.

The Turning Point

The telemedicine work didn’t fix my numbers overnight. What it gave me was a reason to show up to the clinic every day, even when the waiting room was empty. It opened up the business side of medicine to me in a way four years of medical training never had, and it kept me moving instead of spiraling in the silence of May and June.

The Lesson

The silence after opening a practice isn’t a sign you made a mistake — it’s the actual job in month one.

Nobody tells you that the waiting is part of the work. I assumed patients would find their way in once the doors were open. They didn’t, not for a long time, and there wasn’t a shortcut around that. The only real move was to stay busy on something that mattered while I waited.

For Other Clinic Owners

If you’re staring at an empty schedule in your first few months, that’s not necessarily a signal to panic or pivot. It might just be the timeline. Use the quiet to build something — protocols, systems, a side project adjacent to your practice — so that when patients do start showing up, you’re ready for them instead of still figuring things out in real time.