The issue of doctor and nurse retention will be the most pressing concern for hospitals during the next 12 months, according to a poll from Picis Inc.

Wakefield, Mass.-based Picis, which provides information systems that enable the delivery of clinical, financial and operational results in the acute areas of hospitals, surveyed 300 doctors, nurses and hospital administrators for the poll.

Recruiting and retention of doctors and nurses ranked as a larger concern than both the economy and Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement cuts, according to the poll.

The second biggest concern was the rollout of electronic health records.

Nearly 90 percent of poll respondents think that electronic health records are going to revolutionize the health care system but the majority predict it will at least 10 years before they are used in the majority of U.S. hospitals.

Does this mean you shouldn’t worry about training your staff on the latest EMR products, but wait 10 years, until most of them have retired, and then train the next crop of residents?

I love polls.

Off for vacation.  See you after Labor Day.

Since 2004, MedTouch has been delivering cutting-edge online marketing programs, web sites, and integrated technology solutions and shamelessly promoting its clients’ successes.  Those clients include very large to very small hospitals in 20 states throughout the United States.  They engage us because we’re honest, smart, hard-working, and fun!  If you’re interested in online marketing, social network marketing, or healthcare, then come talk to us.

Unapologetically Genius Marketing Internship Description

Our next successful intern will be a preternaturally gifted marketing and communications genius.

Ok, still reading?

Now, we’ll ask you to bring your genius and come and learn about how healthcare in this country works and apply that genius to an industry whose economics are confusing, odd, and overly cumbersome – even to people working in that industry.

You’ll need to be self-motivated and jump right in.   You’ll work on marketing for our company, perform research, and work on projects for our clients.   During your time, we’ll give you tremendous leeway to develop your own “final” project.  For one intern, it was creating assessment tool to segment potential clients; for another, it was a YouTube video done with cut and paste drawings explaining why hospitals websites are so ugly.

We’ll give you the barest introduction and then throw you right in.  We’ll treat you like a team member and demand the best from you the way we demand the best from all of us.  Then we’ll kick your butt at Guitar Hero at one of our parties.

To apply, send a brief cover letter explaining why you’re a genius and a bio or resume to jobs[at]medtouch.com. We’ll invite a few geniuses in for interviews in early September.

You can see in the picture, Ben was dining alone. (Robert, one of our interns, is laughing whilst I pretend to play with my iPhone after stealing a photo).

The restaurant is the incomparable Henrietta’s Table in Harvard Square, so selected to honor our other intern, Henrietta, who asked, “Was Pearl Harbor the last movie he was in?”

Movies in Norway come out a little later than the States…

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

Revenues Increased 110 Percent from Same Period Last Year Thanks to Rising Demand for Health Care Marketing Organizations to Reach, Influence, and Recruit Online.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MedTouch, the leading provider of interactive, web-based solutions for health care organizations, announced that its revenue doubled due to its expansion into search marketing, social media marketing, and physician recruitment online.

“The greatest challenge of health care marketers is the fact that they have almost no way of knowing which consumers to target. Hospital information systems think ‘patient’ is a terminal condition — it ends in discharge or death,” said Paul Griffiths, CEO of MedTouch. “The Internet has empowered consumer choice as never before and yet, hospital marketing groups are still too often left in the dark, relying on traditional media with diminishing response rates. We can change that.”

MedTouch’s technology platform, ContentBridge, deploys sites in half the time and provides superior search engine optimization. Coupled with its social media strategies, MedTouch delivers measurable results in less time for less money than anyone else in the market.

Matthew Dillingham, Vice President of Client Services and Strategy, cited MedTouch’s particular strength in unifying cutting edge Web 2.0 technology with its own ContentBridge platform.

“In the first six months of this year, we saw thirteen client sites go live. We’ve tuned our software and services to deliver at whole new level,” Dillingham added. “While our growth may seem dramatic, it is consistent with our plans and expectation of the changes to come.”

About MedTouch

MedTouch delivers web intelligence for healthcare. Whether delivering web sites, online marketing programs, or empowered technology with provable ROI, MedTouch is dedicated to shamelessly promoting its clients’ success. Those clients include nationally-ranked academic medical centers, community hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, health plans, and health care-related not-for-profits.

The Changing Face of Medicine, due out later this year, will address the issue of the gender changes coming in the medical field.  From the blurb:

The number of women practicing medicine in the United States has grown steadily since the late 1960s, with women now roughly at parity with men among entering medical students. Why did so many women enter American medicine? How are women faring, professionally and personally, once they become physicians? Are women transforming the way medicine is practiced? To answer these questions, The Changing Face of Medicine draws on a wide array of sources, including interviews with women physicians and surveys of medical students and practitioners. The analysis is set in the twin contexts of a rapidly evolving medical system and profound shifts in gender roles in American society.

Throughout the book, Ann K. Boulis and Jerry A. Jacobs critically examine common assumptions about women in medicine. For example, they find that women’s entry into medicine has less to do with the decline in status of the profession and more to do with changes in women’s roles in contemporary society. Women physicians’ families are becoming more and more like those of other working women. Still, disparities in terms of specialty, practice ownership, academic rank, and leadership roles endure, and barriers to opportunity persist… Women’s presence in American medicine will continue to grow beyond the 50 percent mark, but the authors question whether this change by itself will make American medicine more caring and more patient centered. The future direction of the profession will depend on whether women doctors will lead the effort to chart a new course for health care delivery in the United States.

Here’s the other statistic that gave me pause: 74% of Boomer doctors retiring in the next 20 years are men.

Think that doesn’t require a complete rethink of how you recruit these docs?

The silent killer is patient access.   The less chance a patient has of being seen quickly, the worse off he or she will be.  Having an adequate supply of doctors is the basic ingredient of healthcare delivery.  And primary care doctors, who provide those front-line services, are getting even harder to find.

Here’s three reasons why you might be facing an uphill battle, wherever you are.

1. Supply is dwindling.

The AMA reports that nearly half of its members are 50 or older.   If you segment out primary care docs, the news gets worse.   Medical schools are graduating an increasing rate of some specialists, but primary-care graduate rates are falling as medical school becomes an increasingly costly investment.   In the wake of the Patriot Act and the falling value of the dollar, there’s also the fact that more international students are going back home instead of staying put.   (Thomas Friedman calls this the “reverse brain drain” in his book, The World is Flat.)

2. Demand is growing. 

The US population continues to a) grow and b) require more healthcare.   From an economic point of view, there’s no reason to think demand will curtail any time soon.  In fact, hospitals are seeking to drive more care to newly created Centers of Excellence to address complex diseases and conditions.  As more people demand more care from more providers, the rate of demand increases in both directions: hospitals need more doctors to improve patient access as well as treatment.  A client recently told me that a few treatment positions added to ease the strain on the existing physicians were now completely swamped with diagnostic visits.

3. Increasing alternatives to traditional practice models.

While graduating physicians can choose to start or join a traditional practice, there are a variety of other avenues as a result of the changing demands of new docs.  Whether hospitalist positions, physician-run speciality practices, locum tenens assignments, or roles within bio-tech companies, these options often provide fewer hours and more work/life balance than the classic physician practice model.  (Example: many hospitals around the country are now paying for “on call” services.)  Considering that 50% of the med school population are now women, these options will increase, primarily clustered around delivering less hours and less stress.

What’s the solution?

More on that later this week, but we’ll give you a hint: it has something to do with our upcoming webinar.

The next wave of medical school graduates openly craves authenticity, connectedness, and a sense of belonging. Hear how  Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, a 99-bed community hospital, has tapped into those needs by leveraging social networking, community-generated media, and search engine marketing into a cost-effective recruitment strategy for the upcoming generation.

Presenters:

• Mark Novotny - Chief Medical Officer, Southwestern Vermont Medical Center
• Kevin Robinson - Communications Director, Southwestern Vermont Medical Center
• Nicole Goswami - Physician Recruiter, Southwestern Vermont Medical Center
• Matthew Dillingham - VP, Client Services and Strategy, MedTouch

Register Now!

• Thursday, August 7, 2008 
• Thursday, August 14, 2008

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

We also wanted to let you know that we recently posted our Social Media Revolution webinar, so if you missed it or would like to listen to it again, it is now available.

 The Medpedia Project today announced the formation of the world’s largest collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine called Medpedia. Physicians, medical schools, hospitals, health organizations and public health professionals are now volunteering to collaboratively build the most comprehensive medical clearinghouse in the world for information about health, medicine and the body. This free public site will officially launch at the end of 2008, and a preview site becomes available today at www.medpedia.com.

Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, the University of Michigan Medical School and dozens of health organizations around the world are contributing to The Medpedia Project in various ways. Many organizations will contribute seed content free of copyright restrictions. Harvard Medical School will publish content to uneditable areas that members of their faculty have created as part of a medical school wide effort. Others organizations, such as University of Michigan Medical School will encourage members of their faculty to edit Medpedia as individuals.

In a perfect application of my previous observation about the limitations of wikipedia — namely, the core audience is the juncture of encyclopedia geeks, bloggers, and open-source Web fans — comes the news that accredited medical authorities will begin to collaborate on a free project to provide health information to the world.

The ambitious goals of this project are:

1. To unseat WebMD as the premier provider of online health content

2. To position the affliated institution as knowledge leaders (Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley Public Health, U of M)

3. To add more to-do’s for young, upstart medical residents in off-hours

It’s the further commoditization of healthcare information into brands — but now hospital brands!   And, if it intends to be as consumer friendly as it sounds, will pose a threat to all online and offline content providers. 

Medpedia is perhaps the best example of a human SETI@home project: find extra cycles (students) and employ them to process a large amount of focused data.  That’ll keep them from talking bad about professors on Facebook!

PHOENIX (AP) — Rapper DMX was arrested at a Phoenix mall Saturday on suspicion that he gave a gave a false name and Social Security number to a hospital to get out of paying for medical expenses.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said that when DMX, whose real name is Earl Simmons, went to Scottsdale’s Mayo Clinic in April, he used the name “Troy Jones” and failed to pay a $7,500 bill…

Faithful readers of this blog may not be familar with DMX’s music, but suffice it to say, he’s got about $7k in one diamond studded-earlobe and probably drops a similar amount when he hits the clubs.  So why try and stiff the Mayo Clinic?  Well, since they don’t take Medicare/Medicaid and are private insurance only, I’m guessing he didn’t think he got four figures worth of service.

Maybe they should have included a bottle of Cristal.