During staff planning exercises, incorporate additional market perspectives like referral relationships and physician demand forecasts so that your recruitment strategies are sensitive to market dynamics. Doing so can shore up these three best practices:
1. Look beyond 'recruitment' as the only answer to growth
When planners rely primarily on service share to guide their strategy, they're at risk to defaulting to one answer—hiring more physicians—when they see room to increase share, even if there are less resource-intensive alternatives. Incorporating physician share into recruitment planning can show where the system's existing physicians have room to grow their caseload, helping your team target outreach for deeper referral relationships.
Analyze your market's physician share through our Medicare Market Explorer
2. Uncover growth opportunities by accounting for likely retirements
With over one third of the physician workforce nearing retirement age over the next decade, recruitment plans must be informed by demographics of physicians in your market.
Turn to our Physician Demand Estimator to understand the saturation of physicians by specialty in your market. Then, use the tool's maximum age filter to view saturation only of physicians who will likely remain in the workforce for the next ten to fifteen years. Doing so could reveal specialties with unseen retirement risks, and thus new recruitment opportunities.
Forecast physician demand with our Physician Demand Estimator
3. Prioritize providers with favorable referral relationships
Don't let your team be surprised by a new physician's referral patterns. Analyze prospective PCP referral patterns to understand if they have established relationships with competitor specialists. Also evaluate the referral patterns of specialist prospects: understanding where these physicians receive their referrals can help you plan for how much work will be required to maintain or build up this new recruit's caseload during onboarding.