In Temporary Physician Placement, a Proactive Approach Works Best

Many organizations react to temporary staffing needs with panic, working at the last minute to fill upcoming vacancies. Compare it to air travel, where lack of planning can force you to have to pay a premium price for a ticket purchased a week in advance rather than six months out.

There is a better way. Taking a proactive approach can reduce the headaches, as well as the costs of temporary staffing. Begin with the acknowledgement that temporary staffing most likely will be needed at some point during a typical year. It’s a matter of when, not if.

Plan ahead

Preparing for staff vacancies can start with a quick poll of your physicians at the beginning of the year regarding their plans for vacations, conference attendance, and family obligations. Don’t be shy about asking questions. Isn’t Dr. Smith’s daughter graduating from college in June? Is this the year Dr. Patel’s father might have to move into assisted living? Is there anything we can do this year, Dr. Jones, to help you cope with your husband’s long-term illness?

Also watch for signs of physician burnout. It is something we see frequently in our line of work, and we have helped many healthcare organizations deal successfully with its challenges. Be observant so you can “scope out” the most likely scenarios for needing temporary staffing during the year.

Build a bench of physicians

Having a network—a pool of available physicians who have already been vetted, who are licensed in your state, credentialed to practice in your organization, are flexible and have potential availability for the foreseeable future—is the ideal scenario. It might be a good time to consider a locum tenens staffing firm—not the fly-by-night variety that sprang up to capitalize on the physician shortage, but one that has the clinical acumen to partner with healthcare organizations and solve their staffing challenges.

Rather than having to wait the typical 30-120 days to complete the credentialing process, you can begin billing immediately without any gap in reimbursement. Considering that a physician bills $2,000-$3,000 per day, that’s a loss that can add up quickly—from $60,000 to $360,000 and above during the months a physician’s absence goes unfilled.

Consider technology options

There are new options that make supplementing healthcare teams in remote and rural locations a more achievable task. For example, we have worked with a partner organization to bring telemedicine PRN to healthcare facilities when they have a physician vacancy. With telemedicine programs, the remote physicians are all licensed in the state and credentialed in the institution where they are broadcast, so relying on them when vacancies occur is a seamless process.

Manage the unexpected

You can eat right, exercise regularly, and do all the right things to minimize your exposure to illness, but you can’t prevent it 100 percent. The same is true of physician staffing. By adopting a proactive approach, you can reduce your exposure, and manage the unexpected in economically viable ways.

By Talbot “Mac” McCormick, MD