There are about 136,000 physician practices in the United States.
Starting your own practice is an ideal way to gain more control of your career and become your own boss. However, running a private practice isn’t a walk in the park. It requires strong business and management skills, which, for most doctors, isn’t their strong suit.
Although you can start out as one-man practice, soon you’ll need to build a team. After all, you can’t be the one doing everything, from receiving patients to treating and billing them.
Do you know how to recruit the right people for your practice? Here’s a helpful guide.
Know Your Staffing Needs
There are basic positions a private medical clinic needs to fill. But as the practice expands, you’re going to expand your team as well.
Smart recruiting requires you to have a good understanding of your practice’s staffing needs. This helps you ensure your practice is not under-staffed or over-staffed, either of which can have big consequences.
As a physician, human resources management isn’t something that might be in your wheelhouse. Even if it were, executing HR tasks isn’t the best way to use your time. Your patients need you in the consultation room.
As such, one of the first people you should hire is an HR specialist. This professional should have plenty of experience staffing and managing a medical practice.
Don’t Just Consider Professional Competence
When hiring for your physician’s office, it’s easy to focus on finding people who have the technical competence to get things to do. While finding professionals who’re properly trained and licensed (where necessary) is not negotiable, it’s important to consider their personal attributes.
Physician’s offices, just like hospitals and other healthcare facilities, attend to people in great pain and distress. It’s your responsibility as the practice owner to create an environment that’s welcoming, friendly, and empathetic. You can only achieve this by hiring people with great interpersonal skills and the ability to be empathetic.
Remember, patients are your customers. And like most customers these days, they’ll leave reviews online. If your practice doesn’t have great staff, it won’t be long before negative comments about your practice surface online.
Consider Outsourcing
Outsourcing involves hiring or contracting an external organization to do a certain task for your practice. In this case, you can outsource the staffing of your practice to a healthcare or medical staffing agency.
This takes the recruiting function off your plate and you can rest assured that your practice will get the best talent in the labor market.
There are other workforce-related functions you can outsource. For example, instead of hiring in-house medical billing and coding specialist, you can outsource the job to billing and coding firms.
The same can be done for provider credentialing specialists. A company that offers credentialing services like https://medusarcm.com/healthcare-provider-credentialing-service/ is better placed to do a good job for you at a much smaller cost compared to having an in-house worker.
Staff Your Private Medical Practice
Behind a successful private medical practice is a team of workers who know how to get the job done. As a medical practitioner venturing into private practice, hiring the right talent should be one of your top priorities. With these tips, you now know how to go about it.
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