Medical Business Structures in Illinois

To legally operate a chiropractic practice as a corporation or limited liability company in Illinois, you must form it as a medical corporation, professional corporation, or professional LLC, and register it with the IL Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.  Watch the video to learn whether yours is correct!

Referenced Link

How-to Convert to a Correct Business Structure

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Transcript:

We’ve talked a number of different times in several articles and videos about the importance of getting the right business structures for chiropractic physicians’ practice here in Illinois. You know, if you have a business structure, a particular style of corporation, or an LLC, you know, you have to register those particular entities with IDFPR, and there are specific entities that you have to utilize when we’re talking about the practice of medicine. And we have a lot of doctors who have said, I’ve used an attorney and we’re sure it’s right, and then only to find out when they go to actually register with IDFPR, that maybe they were registered as a standard corporation or a regular LLC. In those particular cases, that isn’t okay, actually, you have to be a medical Corporation, a professional service corporation, or a professional Limited Liability Company of PLLC, in order to make that work.

Now, we’ve talked a lot about this. But you know, sometimes there’s some confusion surrounding or some, challenges surrounding the conversion process. So you realize you have the wrong entity, and you want to make sure that you get to conversion, right, you want to get set up correctly, and what is all of that take? We’ve had an article out there for quite a while, that helps those that had the wrong style of corporation, a standard Corporation convert to a Medical Corporation or a Professional Service Corporation, and that’s been out there for a while, we’d encourage you to take a look at that. By the way, you can find that article at ilchiro.org/convert. That will take you to that article.

But the bigger one is more recently, we got a question surrounding an LLC. So we had a member who had an LLC and realized that isn’t the correct structure, that ultimately you want to have a PLLC. Now, the PLLC or the Professional Limited Liability Company allows a whole variety of different types of healthcare service providers to practice together. In other words, you could be an MD, DO, a DC, you can have someone who is a podiatrist, a dentist or even an optometrists practice together under a PLLC structure. That’s really important to know. Now, here’s the key, you got to make sure your name has to include that PLLC as well. If you get any part of these structurings incorrect, and ultimately, you’ll end up just being a standard LLC or the application would get rejected. So the key is this. One is to qualify as a PLLC rather than just a standard business LLC. A PLLC must include in the corporate purpose, the specific professional service or related professional services that you plan to render under that PLLC. So if you were going to do both, let’s say chiropractic and, also dentist, then you would actually put dentistry in and chiropractic and some other terms along those lines. And you can imagine whatever mix, you would have set to include that in your corporate purpose. And then you want to make sure that your legal name actually includes that PLLC as well.

Now, once you get that conversion made, by the way, same article, and there are specific instructions and the form that you have to file, to get that conversion process done, you go to ilchiro.org/convert. Again, that’s ilchiro.org/convert. It will give you the steps that you need in order to convert your LLC to a PLLC, which is what you need to be in order to practice appropriate medicine in Illinois. And then you can get registered with IDFPR. So jump out there, take a look at the article and it’ll give you all of that. Once you’ve done and you’ve finished and completed the process of making the change to a PLLC, you also then want to make sure to get registered with IDFPR and get that registration that if you will that license for the entity to practice, you want to get that taken care of. If you use an assumed name, make sure you get ahold of the appropriate people in your county as well as the Secretary of State to notify them of your name change, and then lastly, the IRS you want to make sure your name change is recorded with them and associated with your appropriate FEIN number as well.

So hopefully, that helps you out. But again, check out the article. It’s fantastic. It’ll walk you through that process gives you links to the appropriate forms that you need. Get your business entities in line with what is required in Illinois, make sure that you’re not under a standard Corporation. Some of you may say, Well, I’m an S corp, well, you can actually be an S corp and a medical corporation or professional service corporation or a standard business corporation, the standard business corporations are going to be the problem right? Instead, you want to make sure that you are one of the other two and so you need to make sure that your structure is appropriate. And if you’re not 100% certain you’re not sure how to check you can check with your attorney to make sure it’s one of the appropriate structures or you can try to attempt to register your business with IDFPR and get that registration process complete and they will let you know if your entity is structured correctly and then you can go make the changes hopefully this helps you out and we’ll catch you next week.