How to Improve Physician Onboarding in 3 Easy Steps

Improve your physician onboarding plan

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 physician onboarding challenges include manual hand-offs between internal and external departments, credentialing issues and physician engagement. Additionally, physician onboarding delays can cost $100K per week in lost revenue, and poor onboarding has been directly tied to increased employee turnover.

According to an article in last month’s New England Journal of Medicine, “All told, the cost of hiring a physician who doesn’t fit and then leaves can easily exceed $1 million when you consider the expense of recruiting, onboarding and yet another vacancy and hiring situation.” It’s undeniable proof that great onboarding can not only increase productivity, performance and morale; it can also strengthen your retention efforts. It’s especially critical in today’s pandemic-ravaged market, as the U.S. faces a potential physician shortage of up to 124,000 primary care and specialty physicians by 2034. Couple this with the fact that only one in three doctors say they received formal onboarding and it’s easy to understand why delivering an exceptional onboarding experience is your secret weapon in the war on medical talent.

Fortunately, with our three easy steps, you can drastically improve the physician onboarding experience for the doctors at all levels within your organization.

1. Automate your onboarding

Onboarding physicians can be a long and complicated process. With automated workflows, the physician onboarding process is simplified for everyone involved. It increases the transparency of the process itself and removes the possibility of error from manual intervention. We recommend including every workflow and trigger in the automated process. This will enable each person to be involved in the onboarding plan, regardless of their department or whether they’re internal or external. With automated onboarding, physicians are conveniently prompted along the way with instructions on what to do when.

This empowers your healthcare staff to provide an excellent, standardized onboarding experience every time and know precisely where a physician is at any point during their onboarding process. The 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 holistic employee 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 the mobile device of their choice. Never make them wonder if they’ve missed a step or worry about what’s coming next.

3. Engage all of your physicians, on every level

Regardless of their tenure, onboarding your physicians well strengthens their bond to your organization and enables them to take the best possible care of your patients. Powerful employee 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 an important and 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 engagement opportunities
  Promote open communication and encourage questions. Host an internal focus group or send email surveys to keep connected.

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.

With the Click Boarding platform, physician onboarding is simplified significantly with a mobile-first site 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.

Trust the experts at Click Boarding

Our team of employee experience experts is here as your consultant. We’re standing by, ready to help you automate the onboarding process and delight your new hires. When you’re ready for your physician onboarding plan to focus on people and let the process run itself, we’re just a click away.