Reporting on the craft, economics and regulation of private practice lactation consulting in American homes.
Nine reports, published , written for board certified consultants who run their own caseload.
Private practice pricing rests on four checkable inputs: drive time, visit length, charting time, and your payer mix. Here is how to build a fee from those instead of copying a competitor.
Credentialing is a paperwork process with a fixed sequence: NPI, taxonomy, CAQH, contracting, then fee schedule. Knowing the order prevents the six month stall most solo practices hit.
Scope of practice is the line between a strong consult and a liability. This walks the clinical red flags that end an IBCLC visit and start a referral, and how to hand off cleanly.
One model gets you paid the day of the visit, the other fills your calendar. Compare them on cash flow, admin hours, denial risk, and the kind of families each one brings you.
Most charting failures in private practice are the same handful: vague weight data, no plan copy to the parent, and notes written days later. Each one has a concrete fix.
A referral relationship is earned with turnaround time and note quality, not brochures. This traces how one solo practice structured its outreach and what the office manager actually cared about.
Home visits mean your equipment travels between newborns. Here is the working kit list plus the disinfection routine that keeps a scale and a flange set safe to reuse.
Coverage rules for lactation support keep shifting through state mandates, Medicaid decisions and network adequacy pressure. Here is what is structurally durable and what is still contested.
Four visits, ninety miles and two urgent calls. A working account of how routing, visit length and charting collide, and the scheduling rules that keep the day from collapsing.
