Building a stable physician workforce: Insights from healthcare executives

For hospitals and health systems, physician shortages threaten access to care. During Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting in Chicago, a panel of healthcare executives shared strategies for creating flexible, resilient, sustainable staffing models.

The session, titled “The New Reality of Physician Staffing: Building Workforce Stability,” was moderated by Shannon Peterson, Senior Vice President, Head of Delivery at Medicus Healthcare Solutions, and featured:

• Matthew Boles, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Salem Health (Salem, Ore.)

• Jennifer Davenport, MD, System Vice President, Medical Affairs, Asante (Medford/Rogue Valley, Ore.)

• Mark Deshur, MD, Executive Vice Chair, Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care and Pain Medicine, Endeavor Health (Chicago)

• Adam Post, Senior Director, Business Operations, Corewell Health (Grand Rapids, Mich.)

Here are four key takeaways from the session:

1. Workforce instability may be a system design problem

Healthcare organizations may attribute workforce instability to recruiting issues. But the root cause may be how teams operate.

Dr. Davenport explained there were several instances when Asante hurried to fill physician openings. Then 18 months later, the new hire left due to burnout. “We had to take a step back and consider how to design our model to retain the physicians we got in the door,” she said.

Asante has rewritten the script by designing a more sustainable workforce model. For example, for its NICU group, with assistance from Medicus, the organization brought in locums. As permanent physicians are hired, the locums are transitioned out. The result — a sustainable physician and APP team model.

2. Care team models increase flexibility and resiliency

As part of Endeavor Health’s care team model rollout, the organization has relied heavily on locums to fill gaps. “This allows us to hire great people as they become available. If you’re in a 42-physician practice and someone calls in sick, it’s difficult to flex up. If you have a care team model, you can adjust staffing ratios to overcome that,” Dr. Deshur said.

Dr. Deshur warned, however, against transitioning away from locums too quickly. “Err on the side of having a few too many people,” he said. “If you have too few, everyone struggles, which leads to burnout and bad care.”

3. When introducing new workforce strategies, culture is key

After stabilizing its anesthesia staff with locums from Medicus and other providers, Salem Health rolled out an employed physician model for its anesthesia staff. This required creative approaches to compensation, and a focus on culture.

To socialize the changes, the executive team held regular town halls and weekly meetings. Around four months into the new model, Dr. Boles encouraged the physicians to develop a mission and vision statement that instilled ownership around Salem’s culture.

4. Effective workforce transformation depends on change management

To replace 150 anesthesiologists at 10 sites, Corewell Health leveraged data and technology to guide workforce decisions. In addition, the team utilized two key change management strategies.

One was appointing at each location a clinical operations leader and a physician leader to address transition issues. The second strategy was establishing a command center to deal with issues. Executive support was also important. “It was all hands on deck,” Mr. Post said. “Executives were rounding at each site, which helped drive the initiative forward.”

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