While physician shortages have hit practices nationwide over the last four years, one practice bucked trends and saw a record-setting hiring boom in 2023, according to an April 1 report from the American Medical Association.
Rockville, Md.-based Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group, an affiliate of Kaiser Permanente, added nearly 250 physicians in 2023, more than it had ever hired in a single year.
Here are five ways the practice has managed to overcome persistent physician shortages, according to the group's Executive Medical Director Richard McCarthy, MD:
1. Always working on recruiting: The practice's recruiting team is always innovating its methods and using new optimization tools. Its team is focused on always recruiting, even if there are no actively open positions.
2. Making quick decisions: The practice prioritizes making quick decisions when it comes to hiring interviewed physicians, as it knows that those physicians could have hundreds of other opportunities on the market.
3. Encouraging physician referrals: The practice is focusing its energy on physician referrals and encourages physicians to go back to their training programs and recruit new talent. In 2023, 12% of its hires were referrals.
4. Creating clear physician pathways: The practice is creating pathways for physicians to gain new leadership opportunities and patient-advocacy opportunities. It is also taking feedback from physicians into account.
5. Reducing physician burden: The practice is investing in the use of artificial intelligence to save physicians time from day to day. It is using AI scribes to transcribe patient encounters and using machine learning and natural-language processing to summarize a conversation's clinical content and produce a note documenting the visit.