You’ve found the perfect physician to join your team and can’t wait for your patients to meet them. Before that can happen, they need to be integrated into your organization, a phase where many healthcare organizations stumble. Common onboarding challenges include credentialing issues, manual hand-offs between internal and external departments, and physician engagement. Physician onboarding delays can cost $100K per week in lost revenue and poor onboarding has been directly tied to increased turnover.

Fortunately, with a few easy steps, you can improve the onboarding experience for your physicians.

1. Automate your onboarding

Onboarding physicians can be a long and complicated process. Automating it simplifies the process for everyone involved, increases the transparency of the process, and removes the possibility of error from manual intervention. We recommend including every workflow and trigger in the automated process, so each person involved in onboarding, regardless of their department or whether they’re internal or external are prompted what to do when.

This empowers your staff to provide an excellent, standardized onboarding experience every time and know precisely where a physician is at any point during their onboarding process. This tracking capability and precision eliminates the guesswork and uncertainty of the manual process, which is especially important during the long and critical credentialing process.

2. Provide a mobile-first onboarding experience  

Simplify the experience for your physicians and team even further by providing an attractive user experience and enabling them to access their onboarding information and prompts through their mobile device of choice. Never make them wonder if they’ve missed a step or worry about what’s coming next.

3. Engage your physicians

Onboarding your physicians well strengthens their bond to your organization and enables them to take the best possible care of your patients. Powerful engagement tactics include:

• Preboarding: between the offer letter and first day, reach out with a warm email, letter, and/or welcome-to-the-team gift box. Make them feel like a significant, valued part of the team before they even show up on the first day.
• First week: focus on making them feel comfortable. Host a team lunch, introduce them to the teams they’ll be working with, and link them up with a mentor or buddy. These social ties are a big part of developing the bond with your organization.
• Ongoing: Promote open communication and encourage questions

We recommend discussing your engagement strategy internally and developing an engagement program that reflects your organization’s mission and values. You want it to feel real and powerful, not some generic engagement program. Ensure each physician receives the same attention to engagement during onboarding by standardizing the process and including the steps in your automated workflow.

If you would like to learn more about enhancing or automating your physician onboarding program we’d love to help.

Our platform simplifies physician onboarding with a mobile-first hub that your team can access from anywhere. We work together to set up customized workflows and automated triggers, so you can delight your physicians with a dynamic onboarding experience.