Recruit and Retain the Perfect Physician

Hiring the right physician to work in your practice for the long haul can be daunting, especially if you’re replacing a successful partner who is retiring or if your practice has a high turnover rate. Before you write a job description or call any candidates for an interview, take the time to create a detailed plan for effective and sustainable physician recruitment and retention.

Determine your need
The first step in the recruiting process is determining why you need to hire a new physician. It may sound simple and obvious, but it is something that requires a lot of thought.

“A good sourcing strategy is a necessary piece of the puzzle for physician searches,” writes Kay B. Stanley, FACMPE, vice president of Coker Group in Atlanta, in its Crafting a Sustainable Model for Physician Recruitment and Retention white paper. “It begins with determining what type of people you need and then deciding the best way to reach them.”

Just because a physician retires doesn’t necessarily mean your practice needs to hire a new doctor. It’s important to consider your practice’s finances and determine whether hiring a new doctor makes sense.

“You need to look at it from a financial perspective and ask, ‘Are we going to be able to manage it and get an appropriate return on investment?’ ” says Craig Hunter, senior vice president at Coker Group. “Then start looking at whether it is going to be the same specialty, a different specialty, what are the parameters, if there is an income guarantee from a hospital, and if you’re going to recruit on your own.”

Once you’ve decided that you absolutely need to hire a new physician, create a timeline for hiring and decide how you’re going to go about the recruiting process. Most practices use some combination of recruitment firms, professional organizations, networking, or job postings.

Emphasize your strengths
Drafting a strong recruitment strategy is critical because physician recruitment is highly competitive.

“The existing and anticipated shortfall of physicians has already created stiff competition among healthcare providers across geographic locations,” Stanley writes. “The competition is especially heated for cardiologists, gastroenterologists, and oncologists because fewer new practitioners are coming into the system. Meanwhile, millions of aging baby boomers require predictable needs for specialty medical care as they reach their 50s and 60s. The competition, therefore, is on the local, state, and national level, as specialists can expect to receive hundreds of offers.”

Because of this intense competition among practices, you should create a detailed outline that includes the strongest aspects of your practice that you can list in a job posting or explain in an interview. The following are possible highlights:

• Your geographic area
• Work-life balance
• Compensation
• Benefits package
• Practice expertise
• Practice size
• Practice diversity
• Awards or other recognition

“Because of stiff competition, you must present your practice opportunity favorably, responding to the physician’s prospective needs and presenting a longer-term view of what the practice and the community offer,” Stanley writes. “During the next several years, there will be important trends in the medical industry that will affect the careers and future earning power of most physicians practicing in the United States. In order to maximize their fullest potential, physicians will have these trends in mind before entering the job market. Adequate compensation is certainly one component, but clinical autonomy and control over their time and work environment tend to be more important over the long term. As younger physicians move into the medical industry, expect quality of life to become an increasing consideration.”

Recruit to retain
Throughout the recruiting process, keep in mind that you’re looking for a physician who will stay with your practice for many years. If your organization has had a problem with high turnover for physicians, you need to determine the reason and come up with a solution before you begin recruiting.

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.”