Physician Selection Toolkit
If you're a Studer Group partner, click here to download the Physician Selection Toolkit.
If you're not a Studer Group partner, click here to purchase the Physician Selection Toolkit.
PHYSICIAN SELECTION TOOLKIT
A CLEAR-CUT STRATEGY FOR HIRING PHYSICIANS WHO HAVE BOTH CLINICAL COMPETENCE AND STRONG INTERPERSONAL SKILLS
PHYSICIAN SELECTION OVERVIEW —
MATCHING THE BEST PHYSICIAN CANDIDATES TO YOUR EXISTING PHYSICIAN TEAM
The purpose of the physician peer interview is to ensure the best match between a prospective physician and the existing physician team. This match must include an assessment of each applicant’s values and collaborative skills, as well as clinical talent. The responsibility of the physician peer interview team is critical because both patient care and your organization’s competitive advantage depend on the combined talents and skills of you and your colleagues.
We encourage you to incorporate into your medical group standards of conduct for physicians and to use those standards in screening candidates. This “code of conduct” can be used to assure that the behavioral standards for your group are very clear to everyone who applies to your organization. Any applicant unwilling to commit to the core values and standards of your medical group is not a match for your organization and should not be granted an interview.
This toolkit is designed to create a reliable, standardized physician selection process that positions your medical group for success. The physicians that constitute your medical group will ultimately determine the clinical quality, work place conditions, patient satisfaction, and the culture of your medical group and a consistent selection process for physician applicants is critical to the long-term performance of your organization.
When hiring, physicians traditionally have concentrated on clinical competence. But in the new health care climate, clinical competence alone is no longer sufficient to drive and predict the success of a physician practice.
According to the Wall Street Journal Online, September 28, 2004:
“People place more importance on doctors' interpersonal skills than their medical judgment or experience, and doctors' failings in these areas are the overwhelming factor that drives patients to switch doctors.”
How do you select physicians whose conduct, behavior, and clinical performance are consistent with the standards and aspirations of your medical group? That question is the essence of this toolkit, which provides a strategy and process for consistent, predictable, and successful physician selection.
This toolkit will allow you to:
- Develop a process for physician selection that enables physician interviewers to select new colleagues based on clinical skills and behaviors that will predict success in the medical group environment.
- Guide and train physician interviewers on how to ask physician interview questions.
- Define what to ask and how to interpret and assess the responses.
- Provide specific behavior-based questions aimed at revealing an applicant’s attitudes and abilities regarding teamwork and collaboration, communication, leadership, caring and compassion, judgment and problem solving.
- Ensure a consistent physician selection process in which the same behavior-based questions, grouped by core values, are used for all applicants, creating an effective, apples-to-apples method of comparing the pool of applicants.
- Identify questions that should not be asked of physician applicants.
- Help organizations standardize hiring processes and reduce variance and subjectivity in hiring new physicians.