Single-Source Physician Recruitment Partnership
Physician Market Assessment
Provider organizations can expect it to become more and more difficult to find, hire, and keep qualified physicians. Five key factors influencing this situation include:
- Decreasing supply of qualified physicians due to a constricted candidate supply, increasing numbers of available physician practice opportunities, and changing patterns in physician career choices.
- Greater competition among healthcare organizations, particularly hospitals, health systems and group practices
- Increasing healthcare demand – particularly for specialists and key primary care specialties – among the aging population
- Significant geographic disparities, driven by issues such as desirability of location and malpractice environment
- Risks of lost productivity, morale and reputation due to high turnover
Nearly one-third of the approximately 800,000 physicians in the U.S. will retire in ten years amidst an estimated shortage of as many as 200,000 physicians by 2020. According to Richard A. Cooper, M.D., in the November 2004 Annals of Internal Medicine, the situation will worsen over the next two decades:
Taken together, the data, forecasts and signals …indicate that physician shortages are upon us and are likely to worsen over time. The picture that emerges is uncomplicated and unambiguous. In simple numeric terms, the number of physicians is no longer keeping up with population growth. The ability to fully service the population is further compromised by the increasing complexity of the care that physicians provide and the decreasing time commitment that many physicians are willing to make. These limitations collide with economic trends that predict a growing demand for physician services.
An additional factor affecting the market is a declining number of medical graduates. Information published online by the New England Journal of Medicine says the number of U.S. medical graduates has declined steadily as a percentage per 100,000 population. From 1981 to 1999, the numbers of U.S. medical graduates per 100,000 population dropped 16 percent. They are predicted to drop another 16 percent by 2020 if nothing changes.
Despite the shrinking pool of physicians from which to choose, more and more healthcare organizations are striving to expand their market share or, sometimes, to proactively replenish an aging medical staff. This expansion is coming in the form of hospitals recruiting and placing physicians in existing physician practices or in outlying regional service areas. Many medical groups, hospitals and health systems, for example, are accelerating their recruitment of large numbers of physicians, with recruitment plans that may entail hiring as many as 70 to 100 physicians over a 12- to 24-month period. The competition for physicians is stiffening so quickly that, when it comes to retention and recruitment, passivity is a losing strategy.
Beyond competition for physicians, there will be more patients needing more care. The first wave of Baby Boomers will reach retirement age in 2011. Not only are there more of them, but they may likely have more medical needs than past generations. “With fewer children to care for them and more of their children divorced and living at great distances, Baby Boomers will face a new set of challenges in order to stay healthy longer,” says Richard Suzman, PhD, associate director of the behavioral and social research program at the National Institute on Aging. "People will have to maintain their health for longer periods of their life in order to be able to function effectively."
Workforce trends such as increased demand for more specialties will continue to drive up top-dollar compensation packages in order to remain competitive. It is no longer effective to assume that the strong reputation of an institution will be enough to lure specialists and other good physicians. Demand drives compensation and specialists know they are in high demand. That knowledge drives compensation higher and higher, and makes recruiting not only expensive, but also frustrating.
In addition to the sheer difficulty of finding and competitively bidding for candidates, organizations today will suffer recruitment problems if they lack a clear vision of what physicians want, and the ability to quickly change strategies to attract and hire them.
Location also plays a part in the difficulty of recruitment. Not only is there a physician shortage, but the available physicians are not distributed evenly across the country. Effectively, this creates an even greater shortage for those areas in which physicians do not readily choose to live. Organizations in rural and less popular metropolitan areas have to work harder to attract an already scarce number of physicians. States with the least number of physicians, such as Idaho with 184 physicians per 100,000 population and Oklahoma with 185 per 100,000 population have a much more challenging situation than states with large ratios like Massachusetts (459 per 100,000 population) or New York, (417 per 100,000 population.) States deemed malpractice “crisis” states can also suffer as medical graduates often evaluate the prevalence of malpractice litigation when determining where they will practice.
To make matters worse, organizations with unfilled positions or increasing turnover leave their quality of care questionable and their reputations at risk, especially if key services are completely wiped-out. Not only is patient revenue lost, current staff members’ morale and patients’ perceptions are jeopardized by physician turnover and lengthy delays in filling positions. With the urgent strain to fill positions, healthcare organizations often make two critical recruitment errors.
First, a lack of understanding of the current physician market and what today’s physicians want. Too often, an organization will create such narrow candidate parameters (based on how they have historically recruited) that they “miss” appropriate candidates who might be solid long-term fits.
Second, out of desperation to fill a much-needed position, they may err by getting “a warm body” to fill a position, rather than selectively finding the “right fit”, a candidate who aligns with the organization’s culture. In the end, organizations with poor recruiting and retention methods find they are merely reacting to increasingly overwhelming staffing difficulties, not proactively and systematically selecting from a pool of highly desirable physician candidates who fit their culture and their clinical needs.
For more information on our Single-Source Recruitment Partnership Model, contact us at info@cejkasearch.com.
Sources Cited
- Richard Cooper et al, Health Affairs, January 2002.
- Richard A. Cooper, M.D., “Weighing the Evidence for Expanding Physician Supply,” Annals of Internal Medicine, November 2004, vol. 141, issue 9, pgs. 705-714.
- Nelson A. Tilden, New England Journal of Medicine CareerCenter for Employers, “The Coming Shortage of Physicians in the United States,” Jan.-Feb. 2001.
- Jennifer Warner, WebMD Medical News, “Boomer Health Care Dilemma, CBSNews.com, Sept. 29, 2004.
- Physician Characteristics and Distribution in the United States, 2004 American Medical Association Physician Masterfile.
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