Physician Onboarding — Frequently Asked Questions

Physician and provider onboarding is the complex, yet often not so formalized process of getting your new hire ready to practice. While that may sound simple enough, there are multiple departments and often hundreds of tasks that must happen simultaneously before your physician or provider can see their first patient. In addition to time-consuming administrative components like credentialing, payer enrollment, privileging, medical staff orientation, and practice setup, many essential tasks focus on a culture, community, and engagement perspective. All these help the physician or provider establish a firm foundation for their new practice, as well as long-term success within the organization and broader community.

When done right, physician onboarding increases new provider satisfaction and retention, drives practice productivity, builds system revenue, and increases market share.

The terms ‘onboarding software’ or ‘employee onboarding systems’ traditionally describe human resources (HR) software designed to deliver a quick, streamlined, engaging experience for new hires. With physicians and providers, that need is significantly different. First, in many cases, HR is not the primary driver of physician onboarding. Second, because of the number of complex tasks and departments involved in physician onboarding, a software platform ensures that all administrative, regulatory, quality/safety, training, practice, marketing, and personal boxes are checked. This process is time consuming, to be sure, which makes software essential in keeping all participants on the same page both before and after the new physician’s start date.

The right physician and provider onboarding software turns all those siloed departmental checklists into a master onboarding process of sequential key tasks to be completed within a certain timeframe. By storing this information in a centralized location, all responsible parties can access, communicate about and complete their tasks in real-time. Leaders and/or onboarding coordinators can also utilize pre-made dashboards and produce roll-up reporting. These reports highlight key trends, gaps, or lags in processes, as well as at-risk providers that need attention to help them meet their start date.

Your onboarding manager or coordinator has an eye on the big picture and keeps all the moving pieces in sync. In many cases, they are also the primary source of communication between departments and new physicians/providers. Lastly, onboarding coordinators or managers, with that big picture per view, can also identify where there are barriers or delays and opportunities for system-wide process improvement.

To assess provider onboarding performance, evaluate the number of new providers over a given time, the percentage of tasks completed on time, the reasons given for changes to a start date, level of engagement (pre and post hire feedback), new patient volumes at key checkpoints (post-launch), proforma performance, retention, and more. A physician strategy platform such as Marketware can help you easily track and measure these KPIs.

• How many candidates do you have onboarding in the next 30 days, 6 months, or even this year?
• How many departments are involved with physician and provider onboarding?
• Do you know all the activities or timelines for each of those departments?
• How do you know where your team or other teams are in the process for each provider?
• How do you know if there are changes to the process or start date?
• How do you identify process improvement opportunities?
• How do you obtain the data to have those meaningful conversations?
• How do gaps/delays/errors in the process impact the provider’s experience/perception of your organization?
• How do delayed start dates impact revenue, patient care, and even employee retention?