I found that my business mainly serviced the elderly and the disabled, and they were unable to afford a high enough consultation fee that would have made it profitable to stay in practice. You lose a lot of money doing housecalls, because in the time that you could have seen 4 patients in a traditional walk-in practice, you have only seen 1 house call patient, including the travelling time to someone's house and then travelling back again. So a house call patient should be paying you approximately 3-4 times what you charge for in a walk-in practice to make it worth a doctor's time to visit them, but I found that people could just not afford that fee. House call patients also tend to be very difficult cases with many many comorbidities, so they cannot be 'rushed' through as many patients can be in a traditional practice setup - this makes it challenging to see enough patients in a day. In a traditional practice, to some extent your healthier patients help pay your bills so that you can spend extra time on the sicker ones, but in a house call practice I found that all the patients are very very sick. I hope that answers your question adequately. Good luck.
