Referral Development: Ask, Plan, Communicate

By Suzanne Dewey, Forté Partners, LLC
Referral development is an art. While the healthcare industry is not at the forefront of the economic spiral, there may be residual impact on your practice. This is a good time to focus on referral management to help bolster your volume. There is a special touch in referral development that done with consistency can help make your practice busy and growing to your specifications. Fortunately, the art form of referral generation is not only for the gifted. With habitual and systematic communication efforts, any physician can master referral development.
 
In most cases, you wouldn’t send an ill patient home without a treatment plan. You also don’t want to begin your referral development efforts without a plan on what you are going to do, how you will do it and who will be assigned specific tasks. Since the new year is still young, this is the time to get your team together and outline a monthly plan for the remainder of the year. You might want to include some overarching tenets to help everyone focus on making sure the patient’s experience is a good one—making sure they are treated beyond their expectations and maybe beyond the usual “adequate” service.
 
Of course, you might wonder what your patients or referring physicians do expect. And asking them is the best way to discover how you are doing. In healthcare, providing good clinical care is an essential focus but because patients cannot judge your clinical capability the same way they judge the service they receive, you might be surprised to find out what patients value.

Creating workplaces where people actually wait to work is the dream of health care organizations today. With projections of worker shortages continuing to cast a pall over the industry, focus has increasingly turned toward building a workplace that will attract and retain staff well into the future. More attention is being given to environments that recognize the balancing act of meeting the needs of both patients and employees. In essence, this movement has placed employees on equal footing with other customers in the organization and redefines traditional externally driven customer service efforts.
 
It wasn’t so long ago that the term “customer” was a foreign concept in health care. There were debates about primary and secondary customers and whether the physician or patient was the most important customer. If employees were considered to be customers at all, their role was not very important. After all, employees were dedicated to helping others and chose to work in health care to help other people. There were also plenty of them.
 
Times have certainly changed. A recent study by the trade publication Modern Healthcare indicates that the shortage of qualified health care staff will get worse and will go well beyond nursing. Projections indicate that the nurse vacancy rate will reach 29 percent by 2020. Allied health professionals will also be much in demand. If the number of imaging procedures annually grows 140 percent by 2020 as projected, many more radiology technologists will be required. It is projected that there will be a shortage of 150,000 physicians by 2020, particularly in anesthesiology, radiology, cardiology, gastroenterology, and pulmonary critical care. There might even be a shortage of qualified CEOs, as many more retire than the number of people groomed to take their place.

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One of the most pressing issues for today’s healthcare organization is finding talent in today’s marketplace. It’s not that talent isn’t there…it’s just that talent is in great demand and the supply is tighter. Even more pressing is keeping talent once it is found…and removing your organization from the constant bidding war for that talent.
 
As we support clients with recruitment, we learned that there are some key things that an organization can do to attract the talent to its doors, and what will help that employee to convert to a loyal supporter for the organization.
 
Five tips for attracting people to your organization:
 

1. Be Clear About the Job—All too often, organizations go into a search without doing their homework on what the job really entails and what they really need from a candidate. Be clear about the role, its responsibilities, who it reports to, compensation and skills desired. While basic questions, nothing turns a potential candidate off faster than interviewing and observing a lack of clarity from the screeners and/or potential employer.
2. Be Open Minded—You never know when a person coming from a different background might be exactly what your organization needs. Many healthcare organizations are purposefully seeking outside industry staff members who can challenge the organization with “out of box” thinking. A different perspective infuses freshness into the role that could add great benefit to organizational results.
3. Be Responsive—In today’s market, it’s so important to communicate regularly and quickly with candidates in whom you have interest. Talented candidates have many options. They aren’t waiting for you to make a decision.
4. Be Flexible—Candidates today probably demand more flexibility than any other generation. You may need to look beyond the traditional way of staffing in order to attract the best candidates.
5. Let Them Know You Care—When it comes right down to it, the most talented people end up selecting a job where they feel valued and where they can best utilize their talents. Be sure to take the time to understand their motivations and what they hope to gain from a position with you…and then make the connection for them.