Recruiting & Retaining Rural Physicians - Avoiding Job Posting Errors - Medicare Readmission Penalties

Allee Mead with Rural Health Information Hub interviews David Schmitz

David Schmitz is the Chief Rural Officer and Program Director of RTTs at the Family Medicine Residency of Idaho as well as the co-creator of the Community Apgar Program, which is an assessment tool that allows rural facilities to grade their ability to recruit physicians to their area. This is a very interesting interview that covers many important topics such as common challenges in recruiting to rural areas, why physicians leave a community or why they stay, and what are the biggest challenges facing physicians who practice in rural areas.

...many rural communities face common challenges in recruiting and retaining physicians, some of which also pertain directly to patient care. For example, in the 9 states that have participated in the Community Apgar Program, many have consistently identified mental healthcare for patients as not only an important concern in caring for the community, but also one of the most significant factors related to physician satisfaction (recruitment) to a rural community in that state.

In other areas of our work, we have found spousal satisfaction to be a consistent factor, which is among the most important and can be a key challenge in some situations. Satisfaction with schools for children is an example of a factor that does differ between states and communities, from being a challenge in some to actually being a distinguished advantage in others. Additional factors such as the opportunity for a physician to satisfy the community needs and “make a difference,” eligibility for medical school loan repayment, and scope of practice are each examples of common rural community assets across the states studied.

Jessica Benjamin at SocialHire suggests 5 errors to avoid when posting job openings

Jessica recently spent some time rewriting job ads for her clients, and as a result she was inspired to offer some tips for not screwing up your job postings. This wasn't the first article of this type that we've seen, but Jessica's tips mesh especially well with how we advise our clients at HospitalRecruiting.com, and we felt this article was worth sharing.

5. Your candidate application experience is awful.

- Make sure you allow job seekers to drop off a resume, even if you don’t have any relevant jobs posted.

- Have a way to store those resumes so they are searchable when an appropriate opportunity arises. Folders on your desktop or an Excel file don’t count, they’re not easily searchable.

Have YOU tried applying for a job with your company? Do you have to click to apply on a job board, and then search again for the job on your own career site or ATS (Applicant Tracking System)? How many clicks does it take before you can drop off a resume?

Do you have an application that people must fill out before they can apply? Does it ask totally inappropriate questions like the applicant’s current salary before letting them drop off a resume? Applicant drop off is real. If you are forcing candidates to go through a process that requires registration on your site or ATS or takes more than a couple of minutes before the applicant can drop off a resume, you’re losing many qualified candidates due to your own application process.

Some human resources professionals think that their application screens out all but the top candidates, but the opposite is true. Top candidates know they don’t have to spend 30 minutes filling out an application when they have other opportunities.

Jordan Rau with Kaiser Health News reports that Medicare will punish more than half the nation's hospitals with more than $500 million in withheld payments over unsatisfactory readmission rates.

The federal government’s readmission penalties on hospitals will reach a new high as Medicare withholds more than half a billion dollars in payments over the next year, records released Tuesday show.

The government will punish more than half of the nation’s hospitals — a total of 2,597 — having more patients than expected return within a month. While that is about the same number penalized last year, the average penalty will increase by a fifth, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.