The announcement: what you may say to patients you used to see

The line between announcing and soliciting

Announcing exists in public — a website, a directory listing, a general social post, an update to your own professional network. Soliciting reaches into a specific, non-public list: mailing or messaging individual patients using contact information you have only because of your former employment. The first is ordinary marketing; the second is the piece that gets clinicians into ethics complaints and breach-of-contract letters.

The practical test worth applying to anything you're about to send: could a stranger who was never your employer's patient see this the same way a former patient would? If the answer is yes, it's announcing. If you built the list from your former employer's records or scheduling system, it's soliciting, regardless of how the message is worded.

Where your non-compete actually stands right now

If you signed a non-compete with your former employer, its enforceability is currently a state-law question, not a settled national one. The FTC issued a rule in 2024 that would have banned most employer non-competes, but a federal court set that rule aside the same year while litigation continued, so — as of this writing — enforcement of your specific agreement reverts to your state's contract law rather than any uniform federal standard 1Ref 1Federal Trade Commission (2024).Noncompete Rule.That the FTC's 2024 non-compete rule was set aside in litigation, so non-compete enforceability currently reverts to state contract law..

That means the honest answer to "is my non-compete enforceable" is "read your state's law and your specific contract's language," not a number of miles or months you can apply universally. A non-compete's terms (geographic radius, duration, what counts as competing) vary contract to contract even within the same state, which is exactly the kind of document worth a targeted read from an employment attorney before you announce anything, not after.

If you saw patients under an incident-to arrangement, who does the relationship belong to?

In some group and medical settings, a clinician sees patients "incident to" a supervising physician — meaning the billing and the service are documented under the supervising clinician's oversight and initiating service, not as an independent treatment relationship of record 2Ref 2Office of the Federal Register (2026).42 CFR 410.26 — Services and supplies incident to a physician's professional services.That an incident-to arrangement documents the service under the supervising clinician, relevant to whether a departing clinician's caseload is formally theirs to solicit.. If that describes how you were seeing patients, the caseload you think of as "yours" may formally have been billed as the supervising physician's, which is worth understanding before you assume those specific patients are yours to announce to directly.

This doesn't change the ethics-code distinction above — public announcements are still fine — but it's a reason to be more conservative, not less, about direct outreach to that particular patient group specifically.

What you can safely do to announce

Build a public presence and let it do the work: a practice website, a directory listing (Psychology Today–style directories, your professional association's "find a provider" tool, insurance-plan provider directories once you're credentialed), a LinkedIn or professional-network update, and word of mouth among colleagues who can refer appropriately. None of this requires touching a former employer's patient list.

A general social media post announcing you're now in private practice is also standard and fine — patients who already know you and want to follow can find it themselves. The distinction is passive discoverability versus active outreach using information you only have because of the employment relationship.

What crosses into poaching

Mailing, texting, or calling specific former patients using contact information from your former employer's records or scheduling system crosses the line, even if the message itself sounds professional and low-pressure. So does taking a copy of a patient list, a printed schedule, or exported contact data with you on your way out — that's a records and confidentiality problem independent of the marketing question.

Also avoid anything that reads as disparaging your former employer or implying patients will be worse off staying — that's a separate ethics and defamation exposure on top of the solicitation issue, and it undermines the professional tone the rest of your announcement is trying to establish.

A gray area worth naming directly: forwarding your new contact information to a colleague who still works at your former employer and asking them to "mention it if it comes up" is a workaround, not a loophole. If the intent is to reach specific patients you can't contact directly, the same solicitation concerns apply regardless of who delivers the message.

Handling patients who find you and ask to transfer

A patient who independently finds your new practice and asks to transfer their care is a different situation entirely from you reaching out to them — this is the outcome ethical announcing is built to allow. Handle the transfer the way you would any new client onboarding: obtain their records through the normal request process, and be straightforward that you can't discuss anything specific about your departure or the old practice's other patients.

If your former employment agreement or your state's rules on leaving a panel address patient transitions specifically, follow that process for anyone requesting your records — it typically exists precisely to keep an inbound transfer request clean and above-board on both sides.

Keep a simple written log of who initiated each transfer inquiry and when, separate from any clinical note. If the ethics of a specific transfer is ever questioned later, being able to show the patient reached out first — rather than reconstructing it from memory — is the difference that matters.

Departure notices vs. launch marketing — keep them separate

A departure notice — informing your current patients that you're leaving your current setting, required under most ethics codes and often under your employment agreement — is a different document from a launch announcement, even though clinicians often want to combine them into one message. Departure notices typically go through your current employer's approved process and focus narrowly on continuity of care, not on where you're going next.

When you're leaving employment, review what that departure-notice process actually requires before drafting anything, and keep your new practice's marketing entirely separate from it — sent later, through your own channels, to your own public audience, not folded into the notice your employer is required to help facilitate.