Most doctors think about clinical skill first when building a career. Far fewer think seriously about choosing a practice partner to build it alongside. Dr Sandip Shah, Founding Partner of GastroPlus, six partners and over a decade in, has plenty to say on exactly that.

Skill First, Then Character

According to Dr Shah, choosing a practice partner starts with one non-negotiable: clinical skill has to be genuinely strong, since patient care depends on it. However, skill alone isn’t enough. Honesty, mutual respect, and shared intent matter just as much, and usually take about a year of working together to properly assess.

Interestingly, GastroPlus never relied on detailed legal partnership agreements. Instead, trust and consistent character did the work contracts usually try to enforce. As Dr Shah puts it, paperwork can be challenged or torn up. A decade of demonstrated integrity is harder to walk away from.

Why More Partners Can Mean Fewer Conflicts

Conflict is inevitable when ambitious, highly trained people work closely together. Dr Shah is candid about this: two main things break partnerships, money and ego. Because all six founders came from similar financial backgrounds, money was rarely the friction point.

Ego, however, is trickier, especially among highly intelligent professionals. Counterintuitively, having more partners actually reduced conflict, not increased it. With six (now twelve) voices in the room, disagreements get mediated naturally, rather than escalating between just two people with no third perspective.

Build One Experience, Not Four Different Ones

As GastroPlus expanded to four locations across Ahmedabad, consistency became the real challenge. Dr Shah compares it to a global hotel chain: walk into any branch, and the patient experience should feel identical, the same protocols, the same coordination, the same standard of care.

That consistency isn’t accidental. It comes from documented, regularly updated internal protocols, covering everything from patient flow to emergency handling, built and refined since day one.

Profit Isn’t the Point, Reinvestment Is

Perhaps most notably, Dr Shah insists personal wealth was never the goal. Profits are reinvested directly into technology upgrades and patient care, rather than personal comfort. That philosophy extends to staff too: GastroPlus rarely lets team members go, treating its roughly 150-person staff as an extension of the founding family, not just employees.

For doctors weighing whether to build something similar, that’s the real toolkit: choose character over convenience, expect ego before money to be the real threat, and build systems, not just relationships.

For more practical guidance for healthcare professionals, explore our Doctor’s Toolkit section, or visit the Medvyn Job Portal for your next opportunity.

Source: Medvyn Podcast, featuring Dr Sandip Shah, Founding Partner of GastroPlus.