About Arzt & Wirtschaft

Arzt & Wirtschaft

Arzt & Wirtschaft is one of Germany's highest-reach journals for office-based physicians, published six times a year by MedTriX GmbH of Landsberg am Lech. For nearly six decades, it has accompanied general practitioners and internists through the business side of medical practice: practice management, billing, finance, law and organization, complemented by the EditionMED supplement's scientifically grounded medical topics. With a circulation of 57,000 copies, it addresses the economic reality of the niedergelassener Arzt — the office-based physician as entrepreneur, managing staff, premises, equipment and finances alongside patient care. Its editorial promise is practical utility: understandable, compact, to the point, always oriented to the reader's direct benefit.

Overview

The German office-based physician operates one of the country's most complex small businesses: a medical practice combines professional medical work with the full responsibilities of entrepreneurship — personnel management, investment decisions, billing under the EBM and GOÄ fee schedules, quality management, hygiene regulations, IT security, and the legal framework of professional law. Most physicians enter practice with superb medical training and little business education. Arzt & Wirtschaft fills this gap with a program built around the practice as a business.

The editorial mix addresses the physician-entrepreneur's agenda: business administration (practice valuation, investment, financing, succession planning), billing (EBM and GOÄ optimization, private billing, the billing audits that every practice dreads), practice organization (staff leadership, appointment management, digitalization, quality management), and law (professional law, liability, employment law for practice staff). Each of these domains carries its own regulatory complexity: the EBM's point values and budgets, the GOÄ's fee framework for private patients, the professional code's advertising restrictions, the data-protection requirements for patient information. The journal's service is to translate each domain's rules into the practice owner's decisions — what to do, what it costs, what the risks are. The EditionMED supplement brings the medical counterweight: scientifically grounded medical topics with direct benefit for daily work, keeping the journal anchored in the clinical reality its readers inhabit. A sister title, ARZT & WIRTSCHAFT Gynäkologie, serves gynecologists with the same business concept plus a standing oncology update. The readership — GPs, general practitioners and internists with their own practices — represents the backbone of German outpatient care, the physicians who manage the population's everyday health and gatekeep the specialist system. Their economic decisions — which equipment to buy, which staff to hire, how to organize the practice — ripple through the entire healthcare supply industry, which is why the journal's advertising pages read like a catalog of the outpatient sector's suppliers.

History

Arzt & Wirtschaft has accompanied its readers for "almost six decades" — placing its founding in the late 1960s, the era when the modern German practice landscape took shape. The 1970s brought the expansion of the statutory health-insurance system and the establishment of the office-based physician as the system's foundation; the journal gave this new professional class — medically trained, entrepreneurially inexperienced — its business medium. Through the cost-containment reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, the introduction of practice budgets, and the growing administrative burden on physicians, the journal's utility promise — economic competence for medical everyday life — only gained relevance.

The publisher's history is part of the story: the journal was long published by the verlag moderne industrie of Landsberg, one of Germany's leading industrial specialist publishers, which built Arzt & Wirtschaft into one of the most important players in physician information and one of the highest-reach titles for office-based doctors. The publisher has since reorganized as the MedTriX Group (MedTriX GmbH, Landsberg am Lech), continuing the title within a modernized media group. Through the digitalization of practice management, the telematics infrastructure's troubled rollout — the electronic patient record, e-prescriptions, and the connector technology that practices were obliged to install — and the generational change in the profession, with young physicians increasingly favoring employed practice over entrepreneurship, the journal has maintained its six-issue rhythm and its positioning as the business companion of the practicing doctor, now in its 28th volume under the current numbering.

Coverage and Content

Each issue's program follows the practice owner's year. Business-administration coverage addresses the entrepreneurial fundamentals: practice founding and takeover, financing, investment in equipment and digitalization, practice valuation, and the succession planning that preoccupies the profession's aging cohorts. Billing coverage — perennially among the most-read sections — tracks the EBM and GOÄ fee schedules, billing optimizations, the private-billing opportunities, and the audit risks, translating fee-law complexity into revenue practice.

Organization coverage addresses staff leadership, appointment and workflow management, hygiene and quality management, and the digitalization of the practice — from the practice-management software to the telematics infrastructure's applications. Legal coverage follows professional law, liability developments, and employment law for practice staff. The EditionMED supplement delivers the medical content: therapy updates, diagnostic developments, and the specialty topics relevant to GPs and internists, including the gynecology title's standing oncology update. The content philosophy is consistent across all of it: practical benefit and direct implementability, in the compact, understandable form that busy practitioners can absorb between patients.

Organization and Ownership

Arzt & Wirtschaft is published by the MedTriX GmbH of Landsberg am Lech (Justus-von-Liebig-Strasse 1, 86899 Landsberg am Lech) — the successor organization to the verlag moderne industrie, one of Germany's leading specialist-media providers for industry, which built the title into one of the highest-reach physician journals. The MedTriX Group's portfolio spans industrial specialist media (with leading trade journals, portals and congresses such as the Maschinenbaugipfel) and the physician-information business — an unusual combination that reflects the publisher's B2B-professional strategy.

The editorial team combines medical journalists with contributors from practice management, medical law, tax consultancy and the physician associations — the expert network the business content requires, and a mix no general medical journal could assemble. The journal is a member of LA-MED, the readership research association for medical journals, which audits its reach among physician groups. Commercially, the journal follows the professional-press model: subscriptions, controlled circulation to qualified physicians, and advertising from the healthcare industry's suppliers — pharmaceutical companies, medical-device manufacturers, practice-equipment suppliers, IT providers, banks and insurers targeting the 57,000 physician readers. The circulation figure makes it one of the most efficient advertising media for reaching Germany's office-based GPs and internists.

Digital Presence

The journal's digital home is arzt-wirtschaft.de, carrying current practice-management news, the digital extensions of the print content, and the media data for the advertising market. The website serves the physician audience between the six print issues with news on fee-schedule changes, legislative developments, and practice-management topics. E-paper editions serve subscribers who read digitally, and the site's archive provides a searchable reference for the business questions that recur in practice life.

The publisher's digital ecosystem extends the brand: the MedTriX Group's portals, newsletters and event formats structure the professional information life of its B2B audiences. On social media, the journal maintains channels for news distribution and community engagement with office-based physicians. After nearly six decades, Arzt & Wirtschaft operates as the German GP's business companion across media: six print issues for the curated business and medical reading, the EditionMED supplement for the clinical counterweight, the gynecology sister title for the specialty audience, and the digital channels for the news flow — "thinking economically, acting medically," as the journal's philosophy puts it, for the physicians who are both healers and entrepreneurs, and who need to be excellent at both, every working day.