GLOSSARY · BUSINESS SETUP
Friendly PC, the doctor-owned half of the clinic.
A friendly PC is a physician-owned professional corporation that holds the medical side of a telehealth company and works with the business side under contract.
01
What it means
PC stands for professional corporation; some states use a PLLC or a professional association instead. The PC is owned by a licensed physician, employs or contracts the providers, sets clinical policies, and holds the medical records. Protocols, prescribing, and decisions about hiring clinicians all sit on this side.
"Friendly" describes its relationship with the management services organization that owns the brand. The two are tied together by a management services agreement and by a stock-transfer restriction or succession agreement, which controls what happens to the PC if the physician owner retires, dies, or falls out with the business. The physician keeps real clinical authority; the business keeps continuity.
02
Why it matters to a brand operator
The friendly PC is where the patients legally live. If a partner owns the PC, the partner holds the practice and its records, and a brand that leaves may lose its patients along with it. Before signing, a brand should know who owns the PC, who the physician owner is, what the succession agreement says, and whether the PC was set up for this brand or shared across a vendor's many clients.
The succession agreement is the most common failure point. Without a sound one, a physician owner who leaves can walk away with the practice, and the brand's clinic stops overnight.
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How Tessic Health handles it
Every Tessic Health clinic runs on a friendly-PC structure drafted for the client's ownership. Patient data generated in the clinic belongs to the client's entity, Tessic processes it only as a business associate, and the client can take it at any time.
See the published termsRELATED TERMS
Words that come up next.
MSO
An MSO (management services organization) is a company that runs the business side of a medical practice, including the brand, software, marketing, billing, and staff, under a contract with the physician-owned practice.
Corporate practice of medicine
The corporate practice of medicine is a legal doctrine that bars companies not owned by licensed physicians from practicing medicine or employing doctors to do it.
Patient-provider relationship
The patient-provider relationship is a legal relationship that begins when a licensed provider evaluates a patient, and it gives the provider a duty to treat that patient to the standard of care.