All Entries Tagged With: "physician recruitment"

Physician Strategies Summit: Medical Staff Development Can’t Wait

What's a trip to Phoenix without seeing a cow skull in a driveway?

On Tuesday, the last day of the summit, I attended “Medical Staff Development: Planning for Hospital and Community Needs.” Michael Arvin, senior vice president and chief development office for Methodist Health System, gave an interesting presentation on how Dallas economic conditions prompted the health system to draft a three-year strategic plan and focus on medical staff development to meet those goals.

Because Texas is among the most uninsured states and has a very small Medicaid program, hospitals take on the brunt of the cost—Methodist alone paid $82 million in uncompensated care in 2008. It realized the patient revenue to uncompensated care ratio was unsustainable, so it created a three-year plan to grow marketshare, expand its service area, and develop partnering models. It worked, and Methodist opened five new facilities since 2006 and expanded into several underserved communities.

And that wraps up my coverage of the 2010 Physician Strategies Summit. For more information about “Physician Onboarding: Recruiting for Retention” check out my column “Successful Physician Retention Must Start During Recruitment.”

Tweeting for Docs: Using Social Media as a Recruitment Tool

When Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA, was having trouble recruiting gastroenterologists earlier this year, Cathy Connolley knew it was time for an innovative strategy.

“When recruiting gastroenterologists we traditionally would do print ads in different medical journals and direct mail,” says Connolley, Geisinger’s associate vice president of marketing. “But this time, we weren’t getting the types of responses that we were looking for.”

So the Geisinger marketing team worked with Zero-In Recruitment Marketing, a Bloomsburg, PA, firm, to create a social media physician recruitment campaign.

Zero-In began integrating social media into many of their clients’ recruitment efforts because it realized that the majority of physicians use the Internet to conduct their job search. According to a 2008 New England Journal of Medicines study, 71% of respondents said they hunted for jobs online. And the popularity of Sermo, a social networking site just for physicians, gives marketers some insight into how doctors spend their time online.

Geisinger wanted to develop a convenient, cost-effective way to communicate with physicians, Connolley says. “So we sat down with Zero-In and they walked us through what it would take to put a Facebook page up and direct gastroenterologists who met the criteria we were looking for to our page—and that tactic outpaced our direct mail approach and our email blasts.”

Geisinger and Zero-In launched a Facebook page in January, which includes photos, recruitment event information, and links to the health system’s site.

Seaboard Health Care Search, a physician recruitment firm based in Nashville, also worked with Zero-In to promote their brand via social media. But Seaboard focused their efforts on a different channel: Twitter.

“We’re in a marketplace that is now shifting to people who are very young,” says CEO William Herrington. “I’m always looking at how to position my organization to take advantage and get to physicians-in-training earlier.”

Read more about Geisinger and Seaboard’s social media recruitment strategy here.

Campaign Spotlight: Recruiting Physicians with Photography

Marketers at Geisinger Health System wanted to create a memorable take-away to give to physician candidates, and they wanted something just a little more engaging than a coffee mug. So the Danville, PA, health system teamed with Wilmington, DE, agency Aloysius Butler & Clark to create a coffee table book filled with photography that highlights the organization’s emphasis on first-class medicine and physician work/life balance.

“To recruit to rural northeastern Pennsylvania we wanted to emphasize our theme of clinical excellence and outstanding quality of life,” says Cathy Connolley, associate vice president of marketing. “We have physicians or candidates that were in serious talks with and we wanted a higher-end piece to give them that was very compelling and left them with a feeling of excellence.”

Marketers started giving the book to physician candidates who visited the organization last year. Connolley says it has a shelf life of about three years before they have to redesign it or create something new.

Read more about Geisinger’s recruitment photography book here.

Five Reasons Healthcare Recruiters Must Engage in Social Media

As physician shortages worsen, one of the most pressing marketing challenges facing many hospitals today is recruiting top talent. To meet this challenge, in-house recruiters routinely deploy an all-too-familiar marketing mix of job board posts and journal ads, while largely ignoring social media.

But why the snub?

Granted, a job tweet on Twitter doesn’t yet have the same reach or cachet as a recruitment ad in the New England Journal of Medicine. But I do believe social media offers immediacy and relevance that may be more effective than traditional means to connect with a growing segment of healthcare job seekers.

Still skeptical? Here are five reasons your recruiters must actively engage in social media.

Your candidates are already there. If you don’t think your next Chief of Surgery or Head Nurse could possibly be on MySpace or Facebook, think again. Social media is fast becoming mainstream media-and clinicians are embracing it. My company recently surveyed physician and RN job seekers and found that 56% are using or interested in social media and 37% use Facebook. And adoption rates will continue to climb with Facebook adding 600,000 new members a day, the fastest growing segment of which is adults 35 and older.

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Guest Post: Notes from The Physician Strategy Summit

The Physician Strategy Summit, hosted by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists, was held in Atlanta, GA this week. Consistently, this is a wonderful conference for those who are immersed in business planning, strategy and relationship development with physicians.

This year, a special track was added for physician recruitment. There were discussions of employment models, legal obligations along with solid techniques for attracting and retaining physicians.

Each general session highlighted challenges and opportunities for healthcare providers, but I wanted to share some facts from Kaveh Safani, MD, JD at Cisco Systems, Inc. It was a compelling presentation. His initial message clearly illustrated that fixing the health care system is not as simple as many try to portray. There are many complexities and here are a few of the examples he offered.

• In a sample of insured Americans between 2003-2007, 1% of that population represented 30% of the total cost with a total annual health care expenditure of $101,000. And the range of diseases in that 1% group was extremely diverse with no clear groupings to change that would provide significant impact.
• Heart disease is no longer the big driver in inpatient hospital activity or cost. The greatest increase in inpatient care between 2004 and 2007 was renal disease. Conditions likely due to increased diabetes and secondary effects of long term treatment of heart disease.
• The present hospital financial issues have more to do with shrinking investments than operating margins. Actual operating margins for hospitals have trended pretty constant.
• The top performing hospitals clear success factor is decreasing length of stay which enhances productivity and results in labor expense advantages. The other is management of interest expense and bad debt. Top performing hospitals actually spend more on drugs and supplies than lower performing hospitals. He went on to say that most of the LOS management is influenced not by MDs but by hospital systems.
• He offered this video, definitely worth watching.

Challenging times mean more push for tighter measures and faster timelines for relationship sales. That message and a great example of how it is being tracked was presented by Lori McLelland and Una Newman at Emory and Carrie Bennett with LifePoint Hospitals. For readers that are not able to travel to seminars, the content is generally available for listening.

Healthcare Marketers: Make the Most of the Economic Downturn

In his poem A Rainy Day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that “into each life some rain must fall.” Another line in that poem is less frequently quoted: ”Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.” 

So here’s a little sunshine for physician recruiters and liaisons in the midst of a downpour: The economy can actually work in your favor when it comes to recruiting and building better relations with physicians.

In this week’s column, Down Economy Provides Opportunities to Improve Physician Relations, three healthcare marketing experts share their thoughts on how to see opportunity where others see wet hair and worms on the sidewalk. For example:

• Delayed retirement plans make employment more attractive to physicians, says Joel English, executive vice president of BVK. It’s also a buyer’s market.
• A slowdown in patient volume means physicians have more time to help increase patient volume, says Leslie Dean, director of planning and marketing at FirstHealth of the Carolinas. Consider inviting them to speak to potential patients or other physicians.
• And patients’ financial woes are an opportunity to help physicians by offering financial assistance to their patients, says  Roberta Clarke, associate professor at Boston University.

More good news (and great advice): Daniel Weinbach, executive vice president and chief operating officer of The Weinbach Group, says healthcare marketers can not only survive the challenges of the current economy but also thrive. Read more in A Healthcare Marketer’s Guide For Surviving In A Bad Economy.