Recruit and Retain the Perfect Physician

Stanley’s white paper lays out many reasons physicians may become unhappy with their practice, such as:

• An unstable organization
• Limited professional growth opportunities
• Office politics/work culture issues
• Demands that make it difficult to balance between work and personal lives
• Patients, cases, and career choices
• Location and lifestyle
• Compensation

“The majority of physician retention starts in the recruitment process,” Hunter says. “During that process, practices create a series of expectations that they may or may not be able to live up to, and if they can’t live up to them, the doctor and their family won’t be happy and he or she will leave.”

Keep your new hire busy and happy
Once you’ve hired the perfect physician, you’ve got to keep him or her at your practice. Once your new hire is settled, take some time to explain the business side of your practice to him or her, especially if it is a younger doctor who may not be familiar with practice business techniques.

“You need to make sure doctors understand the growth and the development side of the practice,” Hunter says. “It’s important that doctors go out and try to establish their place in the community. As a business, you can’t afford to allow the doctor to sit back; they need to get out and the organization needs to appropriately communicate to the new doctor about promoting and marketing the practice.”

You may suggest that the new physician:

• Set up face-to-face meetings with potential referring doctors
• Network with community physician leaders
• Promote him- or herself through educational programs or community service
• Engage in speaker outreach programs

Once you’ve ensured that your new physician is active in the community and working on bringing in new business, you should set up a process to check in regularly with the doctor.

“Reviewing progress and developing a more formal practice growth process and discussing that proactively with the new doctor on a monthly basis is important,” Hunter says. “Say, ‘Here’s where we expect you to be in month six in this organization, and we’re going to sit down in month three and month four and talk about where we are compared to those goals.’ That’s where you have the difficult questions about how are we going to meet those goals.”

“Closely associated with the retention and support phase are the efforts that examine and monitor levels of satisfaction,” Stanley writes. “Periodic surveys are one tool. Developing a structured plan of action for a physician relations program and implementing it are ways to achieve and maintain a smooth program.”