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Update: I stand corrected.  We  did move the webinars to September.  Just making sure you’re paying attention. 

This is our special week of looking at physician recruitment. 

To whet your appetite, here are four reasons why recruiting doctors online works, and why you should try. 

1. New doctors are already online

90%+ of medical students have a Facebook account; 55% have MySpace accounts.   Add in LinkedIn, Twitter, Sermon, and online email accounts and these graduating doctors are used to managing their personal and professional lives online.  What’s more, they self-organize; you can now target med students of a certain college or even of specialities.  Talk about targeted marketing, would you like to be able to get your job in front of a neuropathologist graduating from a top-tier medical institution whose hometown is next door to your hospital?   It’s entirely possible.

2. Your competition is not even thinking about it.

By virtue of the fact you’re reading this blog, I am suspect you may be of higher than average intelligence, looks, and web savvy.  Let’s imagine that your competition for these doctors is, without being unkind, in a different league.   Now they may be bigger, richer, and have a better reptuation, but since you’re considering this as a option, you will have no competition to contend with.  Being first to the market online is a significant advantage and is one of the reasons our solutions are so cost effect (more on that in a moment.).

3. The quality of applicants is superior.

Think for a moment of the different in quality of a personal referral and a resume from a recruiter.   In the first case, you know the applicant has some hard and soft knowledge about the institution — your hospital has come recommended, there is a social benefit for the applicant to working there, etc.   Now think of how much or little the resume from the recruiter knows — they’ve largely outsourced their job search to another person who, however gifted, is an invested party only.  

Recruiters might help you sell the applicant, but the applicant is still weighing options.  Online recruitment allows you to generate better applicants by offering a genuine experience of the culture and break down the institutional walls a little. 

4. It’s cheaper.

The average cost for recruiting a physician with a recruiter is $30k — considerably more based on speciality. We can deliver results from $5k for a placement, depending on specialty.  Plus, you’ll spend a lot less time on the phone.

Yeah, we thought you’d like hearing that.

More questions?  Contact us at solutions@medtouch.com

Back By Popular Demand!! You wanted it, so we brought it back.

WHAT IS SEARCH MARKETING?
Both Search Engine Optimization – appear organically in search results – and Paid Search Management – taking out banner or text ads in search engines. Search Engine Optimization is like online PR while Paid Search is like advertising on billboards.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
Part of our mission is to educate health care marketing professionals about the importance of the Internet. We find that all of our clients benefit from a clearer understanding of how Search Engine Marketing works.
Register for Tuesday, April 1st - Search Marketing Essentials

Register for Wednesday, April 2nd - Advanced Search Tactics

2pm EST | 1pm CST | Noon MST | 11am PST

I spend a fair amount of my time tracking general Internet trends and theorizing how those trends will play out in healthcare.   And as I prepared an upcoming talk, I’m struck by how quickly the concept of a website as a destination will fundamentally change.

This blog is a great example: what started off as an experiment to see how we could influence our search ranking with little effort and zero dollars has turned into a new strategic tool to help our clients.  It seems the future of web content is considerably more fractured, customized, diffuse, and effective that the current “drive them to our homepage” model.

At MedTouch, we’re beginning to develop an online communication strategy for our own company, which includes blogs such as this but also ways of leveraging social media and search biases to our advantage.  And as we’ve run several campaign-based search marketing programs for clients, the fun and interesting challenge is putting together a cohesive, logical plan. 

I’m thinking these plans will matter more than one’s website — in fact, our next website probably won’t be a classic site at all.  It would rather be a series of blog postings, press releases, webinars we’ve given (via blip.tv), and a portfolio for visitors to sort and peruse based on their interests.  Throw in a virtual demo and I’m not sure we’d need much else.

My point is that much of this content might actually exist on other people’s websites and that fact alone would improve our search traffic, which shows the difference strategy can make.

You may have heard of Google, but has it heard of your web site? We would like to help you see where you rank when it comes to your presence on the major search engines. We are currently offering a FREE search engine marketing assessment for your hospital or healthcare related web site.

According to the research from Pew Internet & American Life Project people are using search engines:

113 million adults use search engines to get health care information online – 80% of Internet users
-Specific disease or medical problem – 64%
-Certain medical treatment or procedure – 51%
-A particular doctor or hospital – 29%

Ultimately search engines determine if you are the most qualified healthcare option…