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The Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment (AAPPR) is redefining recruitment to retention and is the only professional organization where physician and provider recruitment leaders and others who influence recruitment, onboarding and retention can connect, learn and advance their careers.
As we enter our traditional busy summer season for Physician Recruitment, it is essential to prioritize balance while pushing ourselves and our teams to meet the high demands of our recruitment goals. Work-life balance is not just noise; it has become fundamental to achieving optimal results and fostering high-level productivity. Finding balance helps recruitment professionals avoid a reduction in productivity while remaining resilient to continue to meet the pace of our industry. Here are some ways to balance goals, avoid burnout, and build resiliency.
Setting expectations with leadership and providing information to hiring leaders and senior leadership regarding the busy summer season is vital. Leaders need to be reminded of the basics and current market conditions. Summer is a hot time for recruitment because practicing physicians are renewing their current contracts. While prospective 2024 candidates are eager to begin their job search. Leaders must understand that the team must act quickly and clearly to accept/reject candidates. It’s a seller’s market for Physician recruits, and they know it. Having the hiring goals finalized to be prepared to answer all questions and explaining any nuances related to the particulars of the position will be critical as there is little time to gather responses from the team and present them to candidates before they move to the next job for consideration.
Monitor processes to look for improvement, reviewing workflows to ensure targets are being met and how they could be addressed if there are any lags. Often during the summer vacation, schedules can impede and extend the timeframes, ensuring measures are taken to keep candidates flowing through the process quickly. Take steps to keep the momentum going even if the regular business partners are not available.
Levering Tech for productivity, in this error of Physician Recruitment, we have many advantages with full utilization of our tools. We cannot only use technology to schedule emails and text messages to be sent out when we are away from our desks but also to leverage the best practices for our specific situations. Most of us have access to one or more tools for advertising and marketing resources, for example, PracticeLink, Doximity, PracticeMatch, etc. These tools provide us with valuable advantages when it comes to accessing our recruitment data. By utilizing these tools beyond their basic functions of job posting and sending out job-related emails, we can unlock additional benefits. Leverage these tools to research what is working (email outreach, postings, etc.) provide insight to the interest of your advertisements, we can target competitors, find out how many graduates are available in our markets, etc.
Using established relationships, check in with past recruits for feedback about working at the organization. Of course, our goal is to get new leads, but we can also leverage this conversation to get ideas about how working is different (for better or worse) than expected. Holding talks with past recruits also serves as a retention checkpoint for the organization to get a feel of the current mindset of the candidate. Remember, you established the original trust with the candidate and brought them into the company, and that is all about relationship, communication, and trust.
Taking time to pause, remote work has its advantages, but it also has our teams sitting longer, working longer without a pause for mental refreshment. I encourage my team to block time in their daily schedules to step away from their work area and go into another room, breath, stroll around the block, send a gratitude text/email to a friend or co-worker, etc. The thought is to engage other parts of our brains and build flexibility into the workday to sustain our hope of positive outcomes.
We must focus on balance and resiliency to maintain our talents within this industry, as many of us suffer as we try to meet the high demands and remain high-functioning people. Turnover within Physician Recruitment is higher than ever. Retaining our talent in the industry is crucial for us to remain sustainable; we must pause and reset physically and mentally to stay effective.
May 5, 2023 (Okemos, Mich.) – The Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment (AAPPR), the nation’s leading authority on physician recruitment, onboarding and retention, has released its Recruitment Process Report.
The report, which is based on a survey of 241 internal physician and provider recruitment professionals, highlights trends in how health care organizations manage the sourcing, interviewing and onboarding process for physicians and providers. The Recruitment Process Survey is the eighth form in a series of Specialized Surveys published by AAPPR, highlighting the advantages of a specialized in-house team of recruitment professionals.
While health care organizations have found success and cost efficiencies through utilizing and empowering their in-house physician and provider recruitment teams, approximately one third of respondents across organizations of all sizes indicated that the recruitment department is not involved in medical staff workforce or service line planning. By including recruitment teams in these types of planning, organizations have an opportunity to improve long-term stability and vertical communication.
Incorporating recruitment teams into strategic planning becomes especially important in organizations that cannot afford a gap in service during a physician candidate search. The report found that while 60.2% of organizations received a signed contract from a physician candidate within two weeks of an offer, physicians’ start dates are an average of 120 days after accepting the position. This is largely due to the credentialing and privileging process, which takes between one and three months for the majority of participating organizations.
“The need for efficiency in the recruitment and onboarding process is becoming increasingly important for health care organizations as more physicians reach retirement age,” said Carey Goryl, CEO of AAPPR. “In-house recruitment teams have unique expertise on the most effective recruiting, onboarding and retention processes and can play an important role when involved in organizational workforce planning. However, in many cases, these teams are underutilized.”
The Recruitment Process Report provides benchmarks on internal recruitment processes, enabling health care organizations to self-assess and self-correct elements within their control. The organizations with the most successful physician and provider recruitment programs are those who work collaboratively with clear communication, role clarity, and measurements of success.
While internal recruitment teams often have the responsibility to fill positions with quality candidates faster than ever, these professionals do not work in isolation from the rest of their organization. Data in the report provides insights on broader improvements that can be made to address common challenges facing recruitment professionals, such as the ongoing workforce shortage, provider maldistribution and ongoing malaise and burnout among physicians and recruitment professionals.
The full Recruitment Process Report is available for purchase here.
About The Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment (AAPPR)
The Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment (AAPPR) is a nationally recognized leader in health care provider recruitment, onboarding, and retention. For more than 30 years, AAPPR has empowered physician and advanced practice provider recruitment leaders to transform care delivery in their communities by providing best-in-class practices, up-to-date industry knowledge, and evolving innovative approaches for hiring, onboarding, and retaining exceptional clinical talent. To learn more or to become an organizational member of AAPPR, please visit https://aappr.org/join-now/.
Facing unusually long wait times for credentialing and medical licenses in many states, physicians and advanced practice providers say it’s preventing them from making a living – and impeding patients from getting the care they need.
Physician and provider recruiters are well aware of the state medical licensing delays. For years, recruitment professionals have managed the challenges that prolonged state licensure delays have on new providers who are eagerly waiting to join an organization practice. In some cases, the unpredictable licensure timelines and unforeseen delays have resulted in organizations adjusting provider start dates multiple times. In turn, this can mean delaying appointments for patients who may have already been waiting to see a provider for quite some time.
The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the backlog, adding to the physician shortage and other factors hampering healthcare recruiting – but does it affect patient care? Deborah Baker, Director of Legal and Regulatory Policy for the American Psychological Association,¹ believes it does. “If we don’t have efficient, consistent processing of these licensing applications, it’s just snowballing the overwhelming need,” said Baker. “This is more than just an administrative issue, this really is a public health issue.”
The length of time it takes to get a license in each state varies. Each state has its own licensing process, and although licensing requirements are very similar across the country, most states require physicians to be separately licensed in every state in which they practice. In addition to state-based licensure requirements, physicians performing services for multiple hospitals (like radiologists reading digital films via teleradiology) must be separately credentialed and privileged at each hospital.
The cause of the delays can vary, but state budgets and lack of staffing are common reasons. The processing speed can also vary by state and profession. Most states license numerous other professions and occupations, not just those in healthcare. Some states have independent medical boards that approve licenses, while others house their boards within a larger agency. Many states also use manual processing systems, requiring applicants to send forms, transcripts, and other records via fax or mail.
Physicians and providers need to be aware of the time it takes to get a license or risk being blindsided by licensure delays. Physicians are typically told it will take about sixty days, but in some states, the process can take six months or more. Prolonged delays have caused some physicians to pivot career plans or work in limbo in a location where they are licensed and credentialed until they can get a license to work in another state, practice, or hospital. All the while, patients await delivery of care.
Delayed licensing is not a new problem, either. In 2009, the California Medical Association2 filed a suit claiming that furloughs instituted by the state unacceptably slowed the state medical board’s processing of applicants for physician licenses. The state medical board had a backlog of applications well before California began its furlough program. In 2020, the healthcare system was already experiencing a physician shortage, impacting access to care, when the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem. It also revealed how ill-prepared state licensure and hospital credentialing procedures are when a crisis requires hiring more physicians to meet patient-care needs.
At the onset of the public health crisis, every licensing agency was forced to adapt. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and almost every state in the country temporarily waived the requirement that physicians be licensed in the state where their patients are located.3 Many states waived or modified licensure requirements and renewal policies to ensure physicians with out-of-state licenses could practice in states with increased in-hospital demands. Did it help? NYC Health + Hospitals (at the epicenter of the crisis in the U.S.) was able to staff up to meet urgent needs during the pandemic,4 and there are numerous other examples.
The Interstate Medical Licensing Compact (IMLC)5 also provided much-needed flexibility to states that needed to license physicians to treat more patients quickly. The IMLC, an agreement between state boards of allopathic and osteopathic medicine, allows board-certified physicians in one of the member states to obtain expedited licensure in other member states. The Compact requires just one application for a physician to be licensed in multiple states where they intend to practice, which helps licensure to be completed faster and in fewer steps.
While the pandemic highlighted the need and the efficiency of the IMLC, it also changed how physicians used the compact. According to research from the American Academy of Dermatology Association,6 before 2020, a higher percentage of physicians used it for localized practice, with about 40% of physicians applying for licenses in a nearby state and an average of 1.6 licenses issued per application. However, after the pandemic began, locum tenens and telemedicine needs increased to account for 66% of applications.
What if physicians who get licenses in multiple states could also use the IMLC to maintain them? According to the American Academy of Dermatology Association,7 one of the biggest issues the IMLC hears from physicians is the difficulty in having multiple licenses with different renewal periods and continuing education requirements. In response, the IMLC is working to create a single source for physicians to log in to view all their licenses and track and control that information.
Virtual medical visits also dramatically increased during the pandemic. To prevent exposure to physicians and patients yet still serve patients, in-person visits were conducted by video. To address the critical need, some states also extended out-of-state licensing requirements for telehealth during the COVID crisis. For some specialties, telehealth has become a vital tool for physicians and patients alike, increasing and expanding access to care in communities. Under the revised licensure requirements, providers can deliver telehealth services across state lines, depending on rules set by state and federal policies. Interstate Compacts further simplify cross-state telehealth for specialists in participating states, according to the Federation of State Medical Licensing.8
Credentialing bottlenecks with organizations and payors can also affect patient care. Any physician opening a new practice, working across state lines, changing practice states, or joining a new hospital or healthcare organization must undergo the credentialing process within that practice or organization – regardless of how long they’ve been working as a qualified healthcare professional. The process requires extensive paperwork and multiple steps, and every state has slightly different requirements for obtaining credentials. Some states estimate traditional credentialing to be 30 to 60 days, while others warn credentialing can take anywhere from 90 to 150 days. Every day can impact a physician or provider’s ability to practice medicine legally, and patient care and access are hindered. The paperwork-filled processes can also increase stress on providers, drain physician enthusiasm, and affect their work-life balance.
Inefficient provider credentialing processes and mistakes can also increase costs. For many hospitals and health systems, 2022 was the most financially difficult year since the start of the pandemic. Research points to administrative waste as a critical driver of excess health spending. According to research from HealthAffairs,9 administrative spending accounts for 15 to 30 percent of healthcare spending, and at least half of that spending is wasteful due to a lack of standardization and coordination of administrative policies and procedures.
There’s no arguing that credentialing is a labor-intensive process. However, the industry is becoming more patient-centric, making it all the more important for physicians and providers to stay up to date with their credentials. That’s why many healthcare industry pundits believe automating the credentialing process can create efficiencies and substantially streamline the process. According to Physician and Practice,10 by importing information directly from primary sources like state licensing boards, a physician profile can be created and extended among health system locations. A physician could verify pre-filled data, supply any missing information, and spend 15-20 minutes versus three or four hours completing a lengthy document. Physicians also save the aggravation of refiling the same paperwork every time they move to a new state, a new hospital, or another practice. Automating and centralizing credentialing could also help healthcare organizations enhance provider satisfaction (think retention) and ultimately help deliver better patient care.
Healthcare staffing complications, exacerbated by the pandemic, put a spotlight on barriers that physician licensure and credentialing procedures have created for the delivery of healthcare. Understanding what the healthcare workforce needs to achieve desired patient outcomes and advocating for faster and easier licensing and credentialing processes is essential to patient care.
1. Building on the IMLC and expanding the Compact to all 50 states and four territories is an important step. It currently includes 37 states, the District of Columbia, and the Territory of Guam.
2. Having multiple licenses with different renewal periods and continuing education requirements is one of physicians’ biggest issues.
3. The proposed national physician license would strengthen our ability to respond to future crises, better allocate medical personnel to areas of need, and reduce administrative costs.
4. Automating the credentialing process can create efficiencies and substantially streamline the process.
5. Providing easier and faster credentialing can allow organizations to offer a unique benefit to the candidates with whom they work, build trust among patients, and deliver patient-focused care.
¹‘A real crisis’: License backlogs in some states are preventing health care workers from seeing patients https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/-real-crisis-license-backlogs-states-prevent-health-care-workers-seein-rcna14740
²Fierce Healthcare: California Medical Association sues state over doctor licensing delays
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/healthcare/california-medical-association-sues-state-over-doctor-licensing-delays
³Bipartisan Policy Center: What Eliminating Barriers to Interstate Telehealth Taught Us During the Pandemic
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/what-eliminating-barriers-to-interstate-telehealth-taught-us-during-the-pandemic
4JAMA Network | JAMA Internal Medicine: Modernize Medical Licensing, and Credentialing, Too—Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic, Donnie L. Bell, MD; Mitchell H. Katz, MD https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2775344
5 Interstate Medical Licensure Compact Commission, https://www.imlcc.org/³U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources: Telehealth licensing requirements and interstate compacts
https://telehealth.hhs.gov/providers/policy-changes-during-the-covid-19-public-health-emergency/telehealth-licensing-requirements-and-interstate-compacts/
6,7American Academy of Dermatology Association (AAD), EXTENDING MEDICINE’S REACH: DermWorld takes a look at the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, by Andrea Niermeier
https://www.aad.org/dw/monthly/2023/january/feature-extending-medicines-reach
8Federation of State Medical Licensing: U.S. States and Territories Modifying Requirements for Telehealth in Response to COVID-19
https://www.fsmb.org/siteassets/advocacy/pdf/states-waiving-licensure-requirements-for-telehealth-in-response-to-covid-19.pdf
9HealthAffairs Research Brief: The Role Of Administrative Waste In Excess US Health Spending
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20220909.830296/
10Physician and Practice: Streamlining credentialing to boost provider satisfaction, patient access by Grant Fields
https://www.physicianspractice.com/view/streamline-credentialing-to-boost-provider-satisfaction-and-patient-access
Have you ever wondered how our candidates experience their interactions with us? How do we compare? We think we provide them with a WOW experience, but do we really? In general (not clinical specific), 49% of job applicants decline a job offer due to poor candidate experience. As we all know, a job search can be one of the most stressful things in life.
How does our job seeker feel about our organization as a potential employer, based on their interactions with us throughout the entire recruitment process? There are many touchpoints during the Talent Lifecycle, from job boards and conferences to conversations with sourcers, recruiters, coordinators, hiring managers, credentialers, onboarders, and trainers.
It is a good idea to review your recruitment process from beginning to end to determine if it meets your and your organization’s expectations—a good review can expose gaps that need addressing. Measuring candidate experience can be tricky. However, you can learn much through surveys, application abandonment rates, decline reasons, and referral rates.
Some best practice tips for a positive candidate experience process include:
A poor candidate experience can risk losing top talent and might harm your organization’s reputation. Poor reviews might dissuade other candidates from considering your organization.
A better candidate experience will lead to better outcomes. We all want to hire and retain top talent, but losing someone because of a poor candidate experience would be a real miss in today’s recruitment climate.
The Association for Advancing Physician and Provider Recruitment’s (AAPPR) Board of Directors is pleased to announce the selection of Aisha DeBerry, MBA, CPRP-DEI, as its new President of the Board of Directors, effective March 24, 2023. DeBerry has served on the Board of Directors since May 2017. AAPPR is proud to share that Aisha will be the association’s first female black president.
In her new role, Aisha will explore opportunities to foster deeper connections between AAPPR, its members and its partners. She’ll also focus her efforts on supporting AAPPR’s strategic imperatives, including empowering members and working to elevate the profession of physician and provider recruitment.
The most critical focus of Aisha’s role will be leading efforts to diversify AAPPR’s board. She believes she not only has the power to advance diversity within AAPPR, but to support physician and provider recruitment professionals in their work to create a more diverse healthcare workforce in their organizations. Her goal is to continue building and working with a board that the reflects the diverse healthcare pipeline and the patients that they serve.
With over two decades of healthcare recruitment industry experience, Aisha is the Executive Director of Provider Recruitment at UVA Health. UVA Health is an academic health system that strives to provide excellence, innovation, and exceptional quality in the care of patients, the training of health professionals, and the creation and sharing of knowledge within a culture that promotes equity, diversity, and inclusivity. UVA Health is an expansive network comprised of the UVA Medical Center, UVA Community Health, UVA School of Nursing, UVA School of Medicine, UVA Transitional Care Hospital, University of Virginia Physicians Group, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, and several other strategic partnerships and alliances.
Aisha received her Bachelor of Science degree in communication from the University of Utah and a Master’s degree from Liberty University. With over 20 years in the healthcare recruitment industry, Aisha is well-equipped to guide AAPPR toward unprecedented success during her term as Board President, which begins on March 24, 2023 and runs through March 2025.
Additionally, the Board of Directors has renewed terms for Marjorie Alexander-Vermeulen, MBA, CPRP; Allan Cacanindin, CPRP, CDR; Logan Mary Ebbets, MS, CPRP; and Stephanie D. Wright, MSA, CMPE, CPRP.
The 2024-2025 Board of Directors brings together a wealth of leadership and expertise that positions AAPPR for success. With their guidance, the organization will continue to bring innovative solutions to healthcare recruitment.
Chief of Neurology: “Well, with all due respect, I’m not confident that you will fill this search for me”
Physician Recruiter: “If in six months I’m unable to find well-qualified candidates for you to consider, I promise not to bother you again”
And that’s how my first meeting as the new Physician Recruiter ended with Dr. Karoubi, my first client. His neurology position had gone unfilled for two years and he’d never worked with a specialized recruitment professional before. Within 90 days, I presented three excellent candidates to him: he hired one, created a new position for another, and eliminated a multi-million dollar contract with a specialty group. With that, Dr. Karoubi became my first Ally!
Transforming my health care system by introducing and establishing a physician recruitment operation has been quite the journey. Having this Ally became a game changer since physician recruiters were non-existent – and not welcomed – in the beginning. While I made the ‘rounds’ championing the value of the physician recruiter, Dr. Karoubi shared his experience – and results – with fellow department heads and executive leaders. Pretty soon, I had a growing network of allies that championed me and the physician/provider recruiter role. This allowed me to focus exclusively on sourcing for top talent and providing a concierge-like experience to my clients while my Allies cleared pathways and silenced the naysayers.
Now, 14 years since that first meeting, our operation has grown from the original team of six to more than 100 projected physician/provider recruiter hires by the end of 2023. What I learned from Dr. Karoubi, and others that followed, is I did not bear this change management burden alone! I credit this network of Allies with making the physician/provider recruiter role a permanent component of our health care system. There are two simple ways I keep those Allies working for me:
Engagement – Whether I’m working on a search or just ‘checking in’, I keep in touch with my allies. An email to remind them I’m one text or IM away to deliver solutions for them, a visit to their department just to say ‘hi’ or simply connect. This strengthens our partnership and further solidifies me as the provider recruitment subject matter expert.
Enlightenment – No, not in a TedTalk kind of way. I send the latest on what’s trending in the provider market and our industry for Ally-awareness – AAPPR Benchmark Studies and White Papers, Becker’s Hospital Review, Modern Healthcare, etc. This keeps us connected even when I’m not working a search for them.
Over the years, I’ve learned to lean on my allies as key strategic partners that champion our profession, at the most critical stages of this transformational journey. I challenge you to do the same by keeping your alliances alive!
Emerson Moses, MBA, CPRP-DEI, shared in her post last month how AAPPR made amazing strides in 2022 to expand the reach and visibility of the association. We have created great momentum and are now off and running into 2023. We have accomplished this through many strategic imperatives, but one of our most important goals is to ensure we maximize value for our members. One of the ways we do that is by offering a diverse suite of professional development opportunities.
Professional development and recruiter education is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. I would not be where I am in my career today without the help of AAPPR. Many moons ago when I first stumbled into a role in provider recruitment as a coordinator, I was a one-woman show with no mentorship or guidance internally. I had no idea what I was doing, and my phone was ringing off the hook. The best advice I ever got was to join AAPPR and get my certification. Within two years of starting my role, I sat for my certification and never looked back.
Many of my fellow board members have had similar experiences or can deeply relate to this sentiment. These experiences have informed how we prioritize the importance of educational opportunities for our members. Outside of the Certified Physician and Provider Recruitment Professional (CPRP) certification we have many educational offerings. In addition to our courses, we also host monthly round tables and webinars. Our webinars have always been a staple of AAAPR’s educational contributions, and we continue to collaborate with our affiliates and corporate partners to offer a wide scope of content related to every facet of our roles.
Over the last few years, we have worked diligently to expand our course offerings outside of the CPRP. We have launched an Onboarding and Retention Certificate, Locum Tenens Management Certificate, and our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Micro Certificate. We identified a gap in introductory education for new members, which led us to develop an Introduction to Recruitment course, which will launch later in 2023.
We continue to prioritize our education offerings as an association because the board understands that when our members succeed, so does AAPPR. Helping our members elevate themselves as professionals allows them to position themselves as subject matter experts within their organizations. This, in turn, creates more visibility and credibility for members and the association.
This year, whether you are new to the field or a seasoned professional, I challenge you always to strive to continue to learn and take advantage of all our educational offerings. Whether that is attending monthly roundtables or joining us at conference in Austin, TX in March, it will make an impact. Together our members and AAPPR will continue to grow and establish ourselves as “The Association and The Professional” for all things provider and physician recruitment.
As the year starts to wind down, and the seasons change, I naturally find myself in a state of reflection. Even more so this year, knowing that my time as President of the Board of Directors will soon come to an end. But before that happens, we have several critical months ahead of us where the Board will dive into our strategic plan for the next 3-5 years. Last week we brought our AAPPR Team, Board and Affiliate Leaders together in Salt Lake City to discuss the future, but it also gave us a chance to share with excitement all that is already happening with the Association! And we have much to be proud of!
Firstly, AAPPR Membership surpassed 2,000 members for the first time this year! We expanded CPRP eligibility and saw our new and legacy certifications climb to almost 700 – and growing! The AAPPR Benchmark report has been viewed and purchased this year (in just 2 months since publication) by almost 30% more organizations than the entirety of 2021! And AAPPR Membership retention has risen to 88% and includes over 500 new members. That just blows my mind – and it tells me that the strategic vision of the Board, and the implementation and management of Carey Goryl and her team has us on the right track.
I am also excited to share that this year we have engaged the support of a Media Relations firm, Franco, to further position the Association and our members as THE thought leaders in the space of Physician and Advanced Practice Provider Recruitment, Onboarding and Retention. Positioning our CEO, Carey Goryl, as the voice of the association was intentionally done to expand our ability to engage in new conversations across C-Suite leaders, healthcare media and the public. The AAPPR Benchmarking report was picked up by Beckers, The Advisory Board, Modern Healthcare, and at least 94 other news sources! We have Board members speaking at Becker’s Healthcare Conference in 2023, and several more sessions in the works! AAPPR and our leaders are also being featured in interviews with multiple leading healthcare publications.
The share of voice of AAPPR in the media when it comes to the work that all of you do is continuing to grow – and we are excited to see what the next year will bring!
There are so many more accomplishments, initiatives, and visions that we have seen come to life this year that I would need several months to cover it all. At the end of the day, I am incredibly proud of this Association – of a Board of Directors who isn’t afraid to shake things up, challenge what has always been and take us into the next phase of our profession; of a CEO and leader that enthusiastically is on this journey with us and never hesitates to push us to think bigger and better; and of our members who tirelessly, day in and day out, do what you do so exceptionally and so passionately that it almost brings me to tears.
Buckle up, my friends – 2023 is only going to get better! More white papers, expanded media presence and a continued drive towards bringing each of you the solutions that you need to do your best work and make the greatest impact in your communities. Not to mention our Annual AAPPR Conference in Austin featuring Keynote speakers Risha Grant and Valerie Alexander! Registration is open!
Take time to reflect yourselves this winter season – on all that you do, and all that you have accomplished. Enjoy your loved ones, your traditions and celebrate yourselves. You deserve it. Because you are, quite frankly, remarkable.
Doesn’t it seem like everything today is attached to some form of number? From stock market indices, labor workforce data, inflation rates…even mid-term election results, numbers can be found everywhere! Even running my computer as I type this post is based on numbers and highly complex computational algorithms.
Yet for all their worth, numbers are numbers, and they still need analysis and interpretation. Be it digits, graphs, charts, or color-coded figures, every number begs to shape a story and to become the very backbone of an author’s interpretation – an interpretation that may just lead to insightful information or perhaps, purposeful action to achieve a desired outcome.
From quarterly business reviews, forward-looking statements, budgets, to monthly operating reviews to the C-Suite and senior leaders, your prowess and keen intellect in the physician and provider space possesses the ability to use data to manifest a story. A story designed to inspire, strike motivation, optimize, innovate and shape the future of our nation’s health care delivery.
In fact, being a data-guided author makes you a more influential and confident leader to shape a unique story arc showcasing resilience, determination, and several hero moments only a good author can bring to life.
As an association, AAPPR remains committed to ensuring you have the toolkits and instruments needed to create a compelling story that makes you an invaluable asset to your leaders and this industry. Have you compared your organization’s metrics to even just one of the data points on the recent 2022 Benchmark report? How will your story provide you and your efforts a hero moment to becoming a premier destination employer?
Before 2022 ends, take the opportunity to tell the full story, be a talented author, be an industry leader, better you and your organization’s success in hiring exceptional physician and provider talent, and more importantly leave a happy ending with many of your readers smiling.
The End.
Have you ever seen the show, Undercover Boss? I remember how fascinating the first few episodes were (until it got cheesy!), and how interesting it was to look behind the curtain of different professions. I always enjoy hearing about the experiences of AAPPR members, so I was very excited when, this summer, I had the opportunity to shadow Patti Crabtree, CPRP, a Sr. Physician and Advanced Provider Recruiter at Indiana University Health for the day. It wasn’t quite Undercover Boss, but it was just as interesting to see how a #typicalday played out for one recruitment team.
I received my itinerary the week before and ubered to their offices early on a Monday morning in August. The team is hybrid, but I was there on a staff meeting day, so most who were local were there. After making the rounds of introductions, we headed back to the desk to check email, #typicalday. Next was a series of meetings, both zoom and in person, #typicalday. We were supposed to do a phone screen, but at the last minute the candidate had to reschedule, #typicalday. Having lunch with the onsite team was great to learn about them and then pepper them with questions! From there more meetings to talk sourcing strategy on a 2 year + rural search and then checking in with a service line leader on the status of interviews. In between meetings we logged data in the ATS, #typicalday.
Some of you know already but my background is not in physician recruitment. After nearly 7 years with this association as CEO and on the Board, I know the content but had never experienced a day in the life. I can read about it, hear about it, but I wanted to experience it.
What I observed:
There are only so many ways to find a needle in the haystack. While there are many tried and true methods that will work for most physician searches, often enough it requires a more methodical approach to ensure you’re covering all of the haystack, with the right message, at the right time to capture that right person. You can’t give up. It is also important to celebrate when you do find that ideal candidate and see first-hand how your efforts have paid off.
The benefit of shadowing on a Monday is that folks like to talk about their weekend. It reminds us that we’re not robots on a job, but real people with real lives. Doug Lewis, Executive Director, does a great job in building his team and I really enjoyed watching the team engage with each other, being human. Its important to practice that to bring that human connection to candidates and new hires throughout the recruitment process.
It still seems that it is difficult for colleagues who don’t do recruitment to honor the nuances in physician and provider recruitment. It seems underestimated and so recruitment teams must continue to internally explain their value at every opportunity they have. Recruitment truly is a team sport that takes the commitment of a whole organization, and as team captain, recruitment professionals have a crucial role to play in ensuring the team is aligned and at their best.
A huge thank you to Patti, Doug and the entire team at IU Health for letting me follow them around and see a #typicalday. Congrats to Patti on her upcoming retirement!
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