Do patients prefer a solo doctor or a big group practice?

When researchers ask, patients lean toward the smaller setting. Multiple studies, including work published in the British Journal of General Practice, found that as a practice grows, general satisfaction and ratings for access, availability and continuity of care tend to fall. Patients from smaller practices reported better continuity with their doctor and better performance from the front desk. Size is not the only thing that decides, but on the feel of care, small tends to win.

Are most doctors still in solo or small private practice?

No, and it is shifting fast. The American Medical Association's 2024 Physician Practice Benchmark Survey found only 42.2% of physicians worked in private practice, down from 60.1% in 2012. The share of doctors who owned any part of their practice fell from 53.2% to 35.4% over the same period, and the share in practices of ten or fewer physicians dropped from 61.4% to 47.4%. The industry is consolidating even though patient preference has not moved the same direction.

What do patients actually get from a smaller practice?

Mostly continuity and access. Patients at smaller practices are more likely to see the same clinician each visit, more likely to reach a real person quickly, and more likely to feel known rather than processed. Those are the things that show up in satisfaction research. The trade off is that larger groups often have more services under one roof and longer hours. Neither is automatically better, but they compete on different strengths.

If I run a small practice, is that a marketing weakness?

The opposite, if you use it. The personal, you see the same doctor, we actually answer the phone experience is exactly what patients say they want and what big groups struggle to deliver. The mistake small practices make is hiding it, trying to look corporate. Say the true thing plainly on your website and social, make yourself easy to reach and book, and your size becomes the reason people choose you instead of the reason they overlook you.

How does a group practice keep the personal feel patients want?

By engineering it, because scale does not do it for free. Let patients request and keep the same provider, answer calls and messages fast instead of routing them through a phone tree, and pass a patient's story between staff so nobody has to repeat it. The groups that win keep the warmth of a small office while offering the range and hours of a big one. That is a systems and marketing job, not an accident of size.

Solo Practice vs Group Practice

A group medical practice team of five clinicians, the model the healthcare industry keeps consolidating toward — The industry keeps merging into teams like this one. Patients, when you ask them, often want the opposite. Photo via Pexels.

A solo family doctor asked us this over coffee, half worried and half hopeful: every practice around him was getting bought up or merged into some regional group, and he wondered if patients now expected that. Was being the small independent guy a liability? Should he try to look bigger than he was? It is a fair question, and a lot of owners carry it without saying so. So we went looking for what the numbers actually say, and the answer is more encouraging for small practices than the merger headlines suggest.

Here is the short version. The industry is consolidating fast. Patients are not asking it to. And the thing patients say they want most is exactly the thing a smaller practice is built to give. The catch is that none of that helps you if patients cannot find you or reach you. Let me walk through it.

The industry is getting bigger. Patients did not vote for that.

The consolidation is real and it is steep. The American Medical Association's 2024 Physician Practice Benchmark Survey found that only 42.2 percent of physicians still worked in private practice, down from 60.1 percent in 2012. The share of doctors who owned any piece of their practice fell from 53.2 percent to 35.4 percent in those same twelve years. And the share working in practices of ten or fewer physicians dropped from 61.4 percent to 47.4 percent. More and more of medicine now runs inside hospital systems and large groups.

But read the reasons behind that shift and you notice something. Doctors are not merging because patients demanded a bigger practice. They are merging because of insurer payment pressure, regulatory load, and the cost of running an office. It is a business survival move, not a response to what patients asked for. That distinction matters, because it means the market of patients out there still has the same preferences it always had, even as the supply side reshapes itself.

42% of US physicians still work in private practice in 2024, down from 60% in 2012, per the AMA. The industry is consolidating for business reasons, not because patients asked for a bigger practice.

What patients actually get from a smaller practice

Now the part that should cheer up every independent owner. When researchers measure how patients feel about their care, smaller practices tend to come out ahead on the things patients care about most. A study in the British Journal of General Practice found that as a practice's patient list grew, general satisfaction fell, along with ratings for access, availability, continuity of care, and even the premises. Reviews of the wider evidence line up: patients at smaller practices report better continuity with their clinician, better access, and higher marks for the front desk.

Strip out the academic language and it comes down to a feeling. At a smaller practice, a patient is more likely to see the same doctor every time. More likely to have a real person pick up the phone. More likely to feel like a name instead of a number in a queue. That continuity, being known by the person treating you, is one of the strongest drivers of trust and loyalty in all of healthcare. Big groups can offer more services and longer hours, and plenty of patients value that. But on the human feel of care, the small practice has a structural edge it did not have to earn.

So the honest answer to the headline question is yes, leaning small, at least on experience. When people are choosing where to get care, that personal, continuous, easy to reach feeling wins more hearts than a big brand does. Which raises the real question for an owner: if that is true, why do so many patients still end up at the big group down the road?

Size is not actually what wins the patient

Because patients almost never choose on org chart. They choose on what they can see and feel before they ever walk in. A patient does not know or care whether you are solo, a partnership, or a forty provider group. They know whether they could find you, whether your reviews looked reassuring, whether the website answered their question, and whether someone answered when they called. Those are the deciding factors, and they have very little to do with how many doctors are on the payroll. We dug into this in how patients actually choose a doctor, and size rarely tops the list.

This is where a lot of small practices lose a fight they should win. They own the exact quality patients want, the personal touch, and then they bury it. The website looks like a dated brochure. Nobody picks up at lunch. There are four Google reviews. Meanwhile the big group has a polished site, online booking, and two hundred reviews, so the undecided patient picks the option that at least looks reliable. The small practice did not lose because it was small. It lost because it was invisible and hard to reach, and the patient never got close enough to feel the warmth.

The flip side is just as true. A large group can have every advantage on paper and still feel cold and bureaucratic, patients bounced between voicemails, seeing a different face each visit. Size guarantees nothing in either direction. What patients respond to is whether you feel present, reachable, and human. That is a thing you build on purpose, and it is a thing you can market.

If you are the small practice, sell the thing you already have

If you run a solo or small practice, stop trying to look like a hospital system. Your advantage is the opposite of theirs, so lean all the way in. The patient who wants to see the same doctor every time, who wants a person to answer, who is tired of feeling processed, that is your patient, and the big group cannot easily copy what you offer them. A few concrete moves:

Say it plainly. Put the real promise on your website: you will see the same doctor, a person answers the phone, we know you by name. Do not dress it up in corporate language. The plain version is the selling point.
Show the human. Real photos of the actual doctor and team, a short note about why you stayed independent, a couple of patient stories. This is where social media earns its keep, because it makes a small practice feel alive and known before anyone books.
Be findable. None of the warmth matters if you do not show up when someone searches your service and town. Doing real healthcare SEO is what gets the small practice into the running against the group with the big ad budget.
Be reachable. Your whole edge is access, so do not blow it with a missed call. Make sure every call and message gets answered, even after hours.

Being independent is not the weakness owners fear it is. In a market where patients are burned out on feeling like a number, it is the story, as long as you actually tell it. We made a similar case in whether branding matters for a medical practice: the practices that grow are the ones that stand for something a patient can feel.

If you are the group, you have to engineer the feel

If you are the larger group, the research is a warning, not an insult. Scale gives you services and hours, but it costs you the continuity and access patients rate highest. The good news is those are systems problems, and systems can be fixed. Let patients request and keep the same provider so they are not meeting a stranger every visit. Answer calls and messages fast instead of funneling everyone through a phone tree. Pass a patient's story between staff so nobody has to repeat their history three times. The groups that win are the ones that keep a small practice bedside manner while offering big practice range. That does not happen by accident. You have to build it and then market it.

Where the front door decides it

Notice that everything in this article, small or large, comes back to the same place. Not the exam room. The front door. Whether a patient ever experiences your continuity and your care depends first on whether they could find you, trust you at a glance, and reach you without friction. A solo doctor with a great manner and a broken front door loses to a mediocre group with a great one. And a small practice with a great front door beats the group nearly every time, because then the patient gets close enough to feel what makes it special.

This is also why leaning only on referrals and word of mouth is risky in a consolidating market. When the big group moves in with a marketing budget, the practice that has no digital front door goes dark fast. We spelled that out in whether word of mouth is enough to grow a practice. Your reputation still matters enormously. It just needs a way to reach the patients who have never met you yet.

How we think about it at EtherealMinds

We are healthcare only, across the United States, and most of the practices we work with are independent or small groups going up against much larger competitors. Our whole job is to make sure their real advantage, the personal, reachable, human experience, actually reaches patients instead of dying behind a weak website and an unanswered phone. We build the full patient acquisition system, design websites that convert a visitor into a booked visit, run the SEO that gets you found ahead of the big group, and make sure nobody ever hits a dead end trying to reach you. Our AI receptionist answers every call and message at any hour and books the appointment before the patient calls the next name on the list.

So the real answer to do patients prefer a solo doctor or a group practice is this: patients prefer the practice that feels personal and is easy to reach, and that can be either one. Your size is not your fate. What you do at the front door is. Whichever one you are, market the strength you have and fix the door patients are trying to walk through.

Make your practice the easy yes, whatever its size

Book a free strategy call. We will look at how patients find you, what they feel when they land on your site, and how fast you answer, then map the patient acquisition system that turns your real strength into booked visits.

Book a free strategy call →

Do Patients Prefer a Solo Doctor or a Group Practice?