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Successfully Onboarding a New Doctor
2024 AAOE Webinar - Edit
2024 AAOE Webinar - Edit
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Video Transcription
Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to join me today. My name is Tony Edwards. I'm the co-president of Vannell. Today we're going to talk about onboarding new doctors within an orthopedic practice. I'm going to be covering several initiatives, thoughts, pitfalls that we've learned over the years, just that orthopedic practices should be taken into consideration when it comes to recruiting new doctors. Now by now, most practices have already onboarded their new doctors for 2024. We're going to begin planning for next year and the following year, and I'm hopeful that through today's webinar, you'll be in a great position to successfully onboard your new doctors in 2025 and beyond. Provide a little bit of background about myself and Vannell. I've been really consulting on behalf of orthopedic practices for over 20 years. Vannell's been working exclusively with orthopedic practices for over 35 years, specifically in business development and marketing communications. We have a staff of over 45 individuals that are truly experts in what they do, in the sense that they do it day in, day out on behalf of orthopedic practices. Over the last 12 months, Vannell has onboarded over 75 new doctors on behalf of our client partners. My goal is to share with you some of those insights and experiences because there's not too many practices or agencies out there that onboard that many new providers in a year. It's one of the reasons we authored Alignment 2.0, for us to leverage and share our research on patient and referral source influence over the last 35 years of doing nothing but marketing orthopedics. If you haven't already read this book, I highly recommend just reaching out to me. I'll make sure that we get you a copy. Before I dive into onboarding a new doctor, let's put a stake in the ground regarding marketing an orthopedic practice. There's only 1% of the market actively seeking orthopedic care in every month. It means 99% of the market will not need your services this month. Over a lifetime, only 50% of the population will ever need an orthopedic doctor. Those two statistics alone require a practice to be extremely strategic with their dollars and their resources and align their strategy with good data on what influences a patient to choose you over your competitor. Orthopedic practices have more of a challenge attracting patients or customers, if you will, than a lot of industries. When groups begin discussing if they need to recruit a new doctor, there are challenges they have to overcome and balancing demand is probably one of the largest. You see, within an orthopedic practice, you have a practice brand that needs to be managed and marketed. You have ancillaries that are typically downstream revenue generators but certainly an extension of the patient experience. Practices have multiple specialties they need to communicate, whether it's joint replacement, sports medicine, spine, foot and ankle, you name it. And at times, it's as if you need to market seven different service lines while continuously cross-promoting all of them. Then you get down to this and realize there are different procedures and conditions that we need to grow volume in, all while you're trying to grow a new doctor's schedule. To say there's a challenge in balancing demand is a significant understatement. What compounds that is really the challenge that practices face with objectives and provider initiatives. Typically when practices begin discussing the option that recruiting a new doctor is necessary, there are varying deciding factors that go into that. It might be to replace a retiring partner, to grow specific ancillaries, maybe add a new specialty to really be more comprehensive with our offering. It might be to alleviate just leakage for current specialties based on appointment availability and access, or it might be to provide certain coverage at a specific location that we need a full-time doctor to be a part of. And when you consider doctors who are in different stages of their practice that are focused on different specialties, and in a lot of cases have different opinions of what full capacity means, it certainly causes a greater challenge when recruitment becomes a topic of discussion. I can't tell you how many times I've been involved in practice discussions about doctor schedules and the need to grow volume or shift the type of patients, and recruitment is typically a first option that gets tossed around when volumes are healthy. But when you start asking the right questions, it's amazing what you learn. For example, is access the issue, and have we looked at actual data to support that as the culprit, or are we just going off of gut feeling opinion, and I will tell you, sometimes gut feeling opinion can be right, but having really good data is almost always right. So I want you to take a minute, go back to the beginning of when the group first started discussing the need to recruit a new provider. What was the reason? Why did you choose to hire and work towards recruiting a new doctor? What was the driving factor behind it? So many times I have practices that will discuss access and open appointment slots without having a clue why successful orthopedic practices look at third next available appointment for provider schedules. You see, it gives you a much better pulse on appointment availability versus looking at the first and second available appointments because it eliminates those cancellations, those rare occurrences that can occur when slots randomly open throughout the week. So if you have a doctor that has a third next available appointment slot, seven to 14 days out or more, when the group should be looking at kind of access data to determine are we losing patients, is seven to 14 days on that third next available appointment acceptable in the minds of our patient? Every market has a different marker on how long a patient's willing to wait. Every physician, doctor has a different marker, meaning if a doctor has a really, really strong reputation within a market that's been there for years, patients may be willing to wait longer, but there are also patients that are not willing to wait. And so a lot of times, you know, I encourage practices to really look at their access and determine what is your market, what are your patients willing to do? Are they willing to wait longer than a week? Time and time again, I hear doctors say, I need to have my schedule booked at least two to four weeks out or I don't feel comfortable, but what if patients were only willing to wait five to seven days? Are we losing patients? Look around the country and look at national data regarding how quickly are orthopedic patients able to get a new appointment into an orthopedic practice? As you can see here, 48% of patients are able to get an appointment within five days, but it's also saying that over a third of patients are willing or having to wait two or more weeks to be seen. It amazes me over the years, the conversations I've had where practices really talk about no-shows and cancellations and maybe we should start charging a fee for those that don't show up for their appointment without taking into consideration how long that patient appointment was booked out initially, meaning did I call three weeks ago to make that appointment that I didn't show up for today? Did my surgeon who did my surgery tell me to come back in four to five weeks, but if I'm feeling better to not worry about it? There's considerations that need to be taken, really, really looked at here and we'll tell you national data that Vanell has run shows that over 70% of no-shows and cancellations occur when a patient appointment was scheduled more than two weeks out. So I encourage you to look at this data for your practice, really assess if access is the topic of discussion we should be having regarding recruiting. Sometimes you might not need a new provider, you need to find more efficiencies and better data to help really with the decision-making and fill those gaps in the schedule, but there are always hurdles to get over prior to bringing a new doctor on and starting their practice and those obstacles will continue post-arrival. For example, getting them licensed and approved with insurance, it doesn't always go as planned and it is getting even harder for some practices that I've spoken with recently. Start that process early on, it'll help put you and the doctors in a much better position. You talk about scheduling, you look at scheduling templates, getting them add to the scheduling template early and beginning to place patients on their schedule one to two weeks before their first day, it'll help ease some concerns for new doctors joining. It'll also make you feel better if they have patients scheduled. Everybody feels better if there's patients already on that schedule before arrival, but remember chances of a no-show and cancellation, they increase if done more than two weeks out, so it is a balance we have to work on. The other thing is just setting expectations. What benchmarks have you set that will allow you and the doctor to feel good about their first 30, 60, 90, maybe even 180 days in practice? Look back at the last doctors within a similar subspecialty that you onboarded and get an idea of how quickly that doctor was getting up to capacity, what was done to bring them to capacity and what were they doing on their own to do that. Your new doctor, should they be seeing 15 patients a day, 30, 40? Just have an agreed upon number early in the process, it'll help you just set those expectations and it'll make everybody feel better about the situation. This is going to sound silly, but now that you've set the expectations with the doctor, have you set the expectations with the spouse? Seems absolutely crazy. I mean, they don't even work at the practice. Why would that matter? And working with thousands of surgeons around the country over the past 20 years, I will tell you, I have learned that if the spouse isn't happy, your new doctor will not be happy and they will not stick around for long. Setting expectations with that spouse can help just eliminate frustration down the road. What are there things maybe that the spouse can do to support a marketing strategy for their rival? I mean, if they're a stay-at-home spouse, they're going to have a much larger network of individuals to potentially reach. They're also, they're going to have more time on their hands to come up with ideas. So are they allowed to share those ideas with the marketing folks within the practice? Over the years, you'd be surprised how many spouses I've spoken with because the doctor doesn't have one, the time to really listen to the ideas or argue the ideas, but also is unsure if the ideas are wrong. So just setting some expectations with a spouse up front will eliminate frustration down the road. Now once the doctors arrived into town, there's common items that should be considered, right? Touring the facility, having a good understanding of the mission and the values of the practice, meeting with staff, getting to know them, as well as laying the groundwork for the training you've worked hard with your staff and with your doctors to offer an exceptional patient experience. If you have data from patient experience, whether that's satisfaction or net promotion ratings that you're looking at, share that and set that expectation for the standard at the practice. Be sure they understand why they're in the field of orthopedics. Sure the money will be good, but essentially they're there to help patients, and every patient has a story if we're willing to listen. So, that's the service side of things, right? The expectations we have and what we deliver to our patients. But there's no question, every practice in the country has faced challenges when it comes to filling positions such as schedulers, front desk, MAs, PAs, athletic trainers, you name it. It's been difficult for groups to recruit new staff over the past few years and the challenge is not getting easier. Spend time with your new doctor. Help them understand this challenge so that it will help make an impact on keeping staff down the road. At the end of the day, you can't afford to have a new provider make this harder. Recently I was on the phone with an administrator and we were working on a plan to lower turnover in their scheduling department. It only took a few questions and we were able to determine that there was a junior partner at the practice that was being, lack of a better word, overly aggressive when it comes to patients that were not fitting the perfect mold being placed on his schedule. This has been going on for a year. They had lost multiple schedulers. Through internal board meetings with this provider, things quickly changed. In fact, it changed across the board. Providers were no longer allowed to speak directly with the scheduling department. They had to go through the administration team to make changes. So, again, don't let a junior partner make your recruitment even harder. There are common pitfalls and distractions that will continue to happen no matter how great you are at onboarding a new doctor, no matter how great you are at setting expectations. I will tell you, when groups fail to plan in the onboarding phase or they rush the process a little bit, we often hear practices say, the new doctor isn't as busy in clinic as we'd like this first few weeks of their arrival. Well, one is, did we actually get them credentialed in time? Did they start when they were supposed to? In most cases, we're seeing that fluctuate more than ever in years past. But at the end of it, you have doctors that are slow in the beginning of their career at the practice. Take them out to primary care offices. Take them out to case managers. Take them out to the coaches and athletic trainers if they're in the sports medicine focus. Use that time appropriately while they're slow. Help them really understand the intricacies of the EMR. So when they get busier, they can be more efficient. The more comfortable they get in talking to referral sources, the faster they'll be able to build their practice. It's a time where they should be doing seminars out into the market. They should be talking with the Chamber of Commerce. They should be at events that the practice participates in. If you're retiring, kind of a transitioning, retiring partner, you got to take even more time to ease into those referral sources and build those relationships. So use that time appropriately in the first few weeks. We see a ton of junior partners come out of fellowship who want to really begin their online presence through personal websites or social media development. And we understand why they do this. They've seen some colleagues and they want to grow their practice. It might be something to encourage if the practice has set self-promotion guidelines within the practice, just to ensure that it doesn't distract from an overall practice's branding and marketing strategy. You know, we look at national data all the time and some of the recent stuff we've conducted is that it's really important for physicians to understand what patients want to see and what they want to hear. Most patients are not interested in seeing surgical videos and photos. In fact, it scares most patients away. So encourage junior partners to use caution on what they're sharing. Otherwise it could be a turnoff for patients. And the last thing you want a junior doctor to do is to minimize the ability to grow their volume. You know, when new doctors create their online presence, let's just say a personal website that they manage, it's outside of the practice's marketing, they pay for it. What guidelines are in place to align with the practice's branding and to be sure that you're not competing with each other online? You know, this is an area we see practices really grow frustrated with, with some of the more junior partners every single year. And it's one that should just be addressed, even at the board level, address what those guidelines should be. Years ago, one of the best things I heard a practice do for new doctors was to create a mentorship program, utilizing senior partners. It's still to this day is probably one of the best things I think a group could do. When junior partners are coming out of fellowship, they're trying to not only offer exceptional care for patients and follow through in the surgical skills that they learned, but they're trying to learn the business of orthopedics. And as you and I know, business of orthopedics is complicated. And so having a senior partner that can mentor them through that first year, it will not only increase the success at a faster rate, but it will also eliminate some of the key mistakes that the senior partner had already made. Your junior partner can excel even faster. And guess what? They'll be even more bought in and less likely to leave the practice. I've covered quite a bit today, trying to do this in a short form. If there are questions or more discussions you'd like to have, please let me know. You know, Vanell is a full service marketing agency that focuses exclusively on orthopedics. We're the only one in the country that does what we do. And I'd love for the opportunity to talk with you. My email is on the screen. Again, I thank you for your time and I look forward to talking with you soon about onboarding your new doctors. Take care.
Video Summary
Tony Edwards, co-president of Vanell, discusses strategies for onboarding new doctors in orthopedic practices. With over 20 years of consulting experience and Vanell's track record of onboarding 75 new doctors in the past year, Tony emphasizes the importance of strategic planning in these processes. The webinar highlights the challenges practices face, like balancing demand and recruitment to replace retiring partners or add new specialties. Emphasis is placed on data-driven decision-making, especially concerning patient access and scheduling. Tony advises practices to start credentialing and insurance approvals early to avoid complications. Setting expectations with both the new doctor and their spouse is crucial to ensure long-term satisfaction. Furthermore, leveraging senior partners for mentorship can help new doctors integrate faster. Practices are encouraged to use slow initial periods for new doctors effectively, such as engaging with referral sources and participating in community events, to build their practice effectively.
Keywords
orthopedic onboarding
strategic planning
data-driven decisions
mentorship integration
credentialing process
community engagement
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