Stop Letting Spreadsheets Slow Down Your Onboarding Process
Spreadsheets Aren’t Enough for Physician Onboarding
Onboarding a new physician is more than just checking boxes. It’s the final step in a long, expensive recruitment process, and it sets the tone for a provider’s entire experience with your organization. Yet, too many onboarding workflows still rely on spreadsheets that weren’t built to manage the complexity and urgency of physician onboarding.
Onboarding new physicians is a critical process in health systems, group practices, and hospitals, where it’s often a complex and time-consuming project. With numerous stakeholders and departments involved and multiple steps to track, having an efficient, reliable system in place is key.
For many, spreadsheets have been the go-to method simply because better options didn’t exist. But as onboarding volumes grow and expectations for speed and accuracy increase, the cracks in this manual approach become harder to ignore. Spreadsheets lack visibility, slow down collaboration, and make it difficult to track progress in real time.
In this post, we’ll explore why switching to Marketware’s Physician Onboarding Platform can streamline this process, improve cross-team collaboration, and ensure timely provider start dates.
Why Spreadsheets Fall Short in Physician Onboarding
While spreadsheets may seem like a simple solution, they fall short when it comes to managing the complexity of physician onboarding. Here are the key challenges:
Lack of Accountability
In a spreadsheet, tasks can easily be overlooked or forgotten. With multiple team members contributing data, it’s hard to maintain clarity on who is responsible for each part of the process. This leads to a lack of accountability, as teams struggle to ensure that each step is completed on time.
Blind Spots Between Departments
Spreadsheets often fail to provide a clear overview of the entire onboarding process. As a result, departments that play different roles in onboarding can’t easily see the full picture. This lack of visualization makes it harder for teams to coordinate, leading to inefficiencies and delays.
Difficult Cross-Team Collaboration
With spreadsheets, sharing and collaborating across teams becomes cumbersome. Different departments may update their spreadsheets, which can result in inconsistent or outdated information. This fragmented approach can hinder smooth collaboration between HR, credentialing, department leads, and other stakeholders.
No Easy Way to Track or Report Progress
Spreadsheets make it nearly impossible to generate actionable reports on a physician’s onboarding progress. Tracking which steps have been completed, which are pending, and what’s holding up progress requires manual updates and calculations, leaving room for errors and delays. Without accurate reporting, meeting critical start dates becomes increasingly difficult.
Risk to Retention
Even when recruitment is executed well, a poor onboarding experience can dampen a provider’s enthusiasm and lead to early turnover. If your onboarding process feels disorganized, redundant, or opaque, it can damage trust before the provider ever sees their first patient.
How Marketware’s Onboarding Software Solves These Problems
Centralized Onboarding Management
Marketware consolidates all onboarding activity into a single system, providing a source of truth for every department and team member involved. Credentialing, HR, department leadership, and IT can all work from the same platform, eliminating silos. Shared updates and role-based task assignments create true cross-team collaboration. With task owners and deadlines clearly defined, Marketware ensures every step is completed on time.
Customizable Onboarding Project Templates & Automated Activities
Standardize and streamline onboarding with reusable project templates. These templates ensure consistency while still allowing for flexibility based on specialty, employment type, or location. With built-in checklists, reminders, and approvals, teams stay aligned and on schedule without manual follow-up.
Provider Profiles & Document Sharing
Each provider has a dedicated profile where teams can track details, upload documents, log family-specific information, and add notes. This shared workspace reduces redundant requests and creates a seamless, personalized experience for providers.
Visual Project Status Board
Gain real-time visibility into where each provider is in the onboarding process. With clear status indicators, teams can easily see which tasks are completed and which are pending, helping ensure that physicians meet their start dates without delay.
Collaboration that Extends from Recruitment to Onboarding
Marketware supports this complexity by providing a centralized platform where teams can share notes, upload documents, track activities, and communicate in real time. Once a candidate is hired, their complete profile, history, and documentation seamlessly transition into Marketware’s Onboarding Platform, eliminating duplicate entries and disconnected handoffs. This integration ensures consistent workflows, greater visibility, and a smooth handoff between recruitment and onboarding teams.
With everyone working from a shared system, your organization can deliver a cohesive experience that sets new hires up for long-term success, starting from the very first interaction.
Learn About the Recruitment Platform →
4 Reasons Physician Onboarders Are Choosing Marketware Over Spreadsheets
1. Efficiency
✓ Marketware: Automates reminders, task tracking, & updates in real time.
✘ Spreadsheets: Manual entry & status checks waste valuable time.
Automating tasks such as reminders, progress tracking, and reporting saves time and reduces manual work. With everything centralized in one platform, the onboarding process is faster, allowing physicians to meet start dates without the hassle of chasing down documents or manually updating spreadsheets.
2. Accountability & Collaboration
✓ Marketware: Assigns task owners, deadlines, & real-time updates to keep everyone aligned.
✘ Spreadsheets: Disconnected trackers & unclear ownership lead to delays & miscommunication.
By clearly defining roles and responsibilities within the platform, Marketware ensures that every team member knows exactly what they are responsible for. This accountability helps eliminate confusion and delays, making it easier to keep the onboarding process on track.
3. Visibility with Reporting & Insights
✓ Marketware: Dashboards show progress, blockers, & key milestones.
✘ Spreadsheets: Fragmented views make oversight difficult.
Marketware’s robust reporting features allow you to track progress at every stage of the onboarding process. By easily generating reports, teams can gain valuable insights into bottlenecks and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach ensures that onboarding is as efficient and effective as possible.
4. Provider Experience & Retention
✓ Marketware: Creates a smooth, personalized experience that builds trust & supports long-term retention.
✘ Spreadsheets: Disorganized onboarding can frustrate providers & increase the risk of early turnover.
A provider’s first impression of your organization often comes from the onboarding process. Marketware helps create a professional, streamlined, and thoughtful experience that builds trust from the start. By reducing duplicated requests and ensuring timely communication, your organization demonstrates a commitment to supporting the provider’s success, making them more likely to stay and thrive long-term.
Ready to Upgrade Your Physician Onboarding Process?
When it comes to physician onboarding, the risks of relying on spreadsheets are clear: lack of accountability, poor visibility, and inefficient cross-team collaboration can lead to delays, errors, and missed deadlines.
By ditching spreadsheets and adopting a purpose-built onboarding platform, health systems, and group practices can streamline workflows, reduce administrative burden, improve the provider experience, protect long-term retention, and improve the overall quality of care.
If you’re ready to streamline your physician onboarding process and leave spreadsheets behind, Marketware is the solution you’ve been looking for.
Demo — Physician Onboarding
An Inside Look at Marketware’s Onboarding Platform
Our healthcare-specific recruitment and onboarding platforms are designed by industry professionals to streamline your hiring process, helping you source, qualify, and retain the best providers with ease. Interested in learning more about how Marketware’s Recruit Platform can help?
Tool Kit — Physician Onboarding
Physician Onboarding Plan
This toolkit provides essential templates and guides to ensure a smooth transition for new providers, from their first 100 days to full integration within your organization. Inside, you’ll find structured assessment plans, onboarding checklists, referral development tools, and communication strategies—everything you need to support and retain top medical talent.
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