Uniting Patient Care, Education, and Research: Employee Engagement in Academic Medical Centers
Each year, Morehead looks at the state of physician engagement and its comparison to the previous year. While Morehead offers a suite of physician surveys for staff and employed, referring, faculty, and clinic-based physicians, this information focuses on staff and employed physicians practicing in a hospital setting.
Collecting feedback from staff and employed physicians can be challenging for hospitals and health systems. One method of gathering this information is through physician engagement surveys. Because physicians are often unavailable due to busy schedules or may even be reluctant to participate in a survey process, response rates may be lower than they are for other healthcare workers. To increase the participation rate among physicians, we suggest a number of straightforward strategies be considered as part of the overall physician survey process.
As the two case studies in this paper show, understanding the financial impact of physician engagement is clearly beneficial. Health systems striving to achieve higher levels of organizational performance must know how to properly measure and interpret physician engagement. By doing so, they can propel an organization to higher levels of business performance.
Morehead's referring physician research can be used to increase the effectiveness of a physician liaison team's strategy. Our findings show that key messages can be tailored, based on geography, to build loyalty and dedication between the physician and the organization.
To help organizations improve hospital-physician relationships, Morehead conducted research with a broad sample of physicians across the United States and developed an empirical model for physician engagement. Practical application of this research provides organizations an understanding of where physician relationships can be improved and best practices for doing so.
By adopting a holistic physician lifecycle approach, healthcare organizations can focus on crucial employment milestones and identify key metrics that should be examined within each stage. Lifecycle metrics are easily integrated into organizational scorecards and provide a continual stream of measurement for organizations committed to evidence-based decision making.
As organizations strive for stability among their physicians, one challenge will be to acknowledge and understand the unique needs and expectations of physicians based on their generational membership. By fine tuning physician relations and recruitment strategies to include age considerations, healthcare organizations have an advantage over competitors that treat all physicians as a single homogenous group.
Well-designed physician surveys provide valuable feedback for hospitals by identifying areas of strength and opportunities for improvement. However, many organizations lack effective strategies for using this feedback to enhance hospital-physician relations and improve organizational performance. This innovative approach enables organizations to focus on key issues, while overcoming the barriers that often impede physician survey action planning.
