You’ve found the right physician to join your team and patients are waiting to meet them. But before that happens, your new hire needs to be integrated into your organization … and this a phase where even well-run healthcare systems routinely stumble.
The culprit? A poor onboarding experience, similar to what nurses may face as a hiring issue; manual hand-offs between internal and external departments, credentialing delays, and physician engagement that fades before Day 1 even arrives.
And the stakes are high: Every physician departure costs health systems up to $1.2 million in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity, according to IMA Financial Group’s 2026 healthcare workforce analysis … and for high-volume specialists, that figure climbs further. It’s only worsened by a projected shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, per the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Every physician you successfully onboard and retain has a bigger bottom-line impact, so let’s explore how you can improve your healthcare onboarding.
Physician onboarding has a systems problem
Physician onboarding is a more complex integration challenge than what typical employee onboarding may require; credentialing alone usually involves verifying board certification, confirming DEA registration, processing hospital privileges, validating malpractice insurance, and completing payer enrollment … and each has its own timeline.
Layer on top of that the internal hand-offs between HR, medical staff services, IT, and departmental leadership, and you have a process where a single missed step can add weeks to a physician’s start date. Medallion found it’s 15+ days on average just for credentialing.
MGMA research highlights 35% of surveyed medical groups struggle with having provider files on time. If you’re feeling this pain, you’re certainly not alone! But this is where manual, spreadsheet-driven coordination breaks down. Credentialing status lives in one system while IT provisioning requests sit in an inbox mean confusion (which trickles down to your physician waiting to start).
Automated workflows solve this by giving every stakeholder, internal or external, a single source of truth around what’s finished, outstanding, and perhaps most importantly: who’s accountable for moving this forward. Just that visibility eliminates a significant share of the delays!
Physician engagement carries a distinct risk profile
Our own 2026 research into new hire ghosting found that health and social care has one of the highest ghosting rates of any sector measured at 54%, putting it ahead of industries such as hospitality and retail.
Physicians and clinical staff are frequently fielding competing offers throughout a long credentialing timeline, which means the gap between offer acceptance and Day 1 is an active retention risk. The cost of turnover is very much quantifiable, and there’s a correlation between high turnover and a disjointed onboarding process which shows up even more in industries like healthcare that are so revenue driven.
If credentialing takes a few weeks and your organization goes silent for large stretches of that time period, you’re inviting doubt … which a physician with other options may act upon.
Three ways to strengthen your physician onboarding plan
Automate the entire workflow
Don’t be the 35% struggling! Automated workflows simplify the process for everyone involved by increasing transparency and removing the risk of manual error, with the goal to include every workflow and trigger in a single automated process.
Every stakeholder, regardless of department or whether they’re internal or external to the organization, should align to the same process. And you should know at-a-glance where something’s help up (great platforms offer real-time visibility).
This is especially important with credentialing; integrating with external systems lets you know if a Board certification has been verified. That shouldn’t be a task that sits for a week on your to-do list while you juggle 100 other items!
Provide a linear, mobile-first onboarding experience
Physicians are, by the nature of the role, rarely at a desk. A mobile-first onboarding experience lets them complete documentation and check their status from whatever device they have on hand and on their preferred timeframe.
Removing friction around “I’ll deal with this when I’m back at a computer” measurably improves completion timelines and removes the uncertainty of wondering whether a step has been missed.
And by having a linear process, where they have to complete a step before moving on the the next one, you’re removing a common pitfall where one form gets missed. Our clients see completion rates above 95% across the board!
Engage physicians before (and after) they begin
If you believe onboarding starts when your new hire walks in the door, you’re already behind. Think of best-in-class as having three steps:
- Preboarding. This spans before their first day and begins immediately once your physician accepts the job offer. Start by reaching out with a warm welcome and stay in touch every 2-3 days with relevant updates on their credentialing progress and build team affinity. Our preboarding checklist for reducing candidate ghosting applies directly here, particularly given how long the physician credentialing window typically runs.
- First week. Focus on making them feel comfortable and connected: a team lunch, structured introductions to the departments they’ll work with, and a mentor or buddy who can answer the questions they might not feel comfortable raising with departmental leadership.
- Ongoing engagement. Promote open communication well past the first week. A brief internal focus group or pulse survey a few months in can surface friction points while there’s still time to act on them while flagging anything you can do to improve for the next hiring cycle.
I recommend developing this internally … you can take a standardized template as a good starting point, but go through it step-by-step and make sure you’re communicating the experience you want the new hire to feel.
Physician onboarding platform? Handled.
None of this works at scale without the right system architecture underneath it.
Credentialing data, HRIS records, departmental workflows, and communication need to move between systems reliably and securely. You want a purpose-built platform that both allows you to systemically automate while getting information where it’s needed … fast. That’s why I say onboarding is fundamentally an integration and data governance challenge as much as an HR one.
With the right platform, physician onboarding (and, for the record, all other transitions – including promotions, M&A, and offboarding) becomes significantly more manageable. If you’re ready for your physician onboarding plan to focus on people and let the process run itself, explore what our healthcare onboarding platform can do for your organization.
