1. Don’t send nobody nobody sent. The Chicago City Hall hiring axiom applies to recruiting doctors for ASCs.
“What I realize now is that I made it much harder on myself than I needed to,” says Ms. Ramirez. “The bottom line is it’s extremely difficult to get to a doctor through his or her office. There are too many gatekeepers. Physicians are very busy and guarded. Unless you can call them with something incredibly new or different or you have a doctor who referred you or a medical company representative, it’s really difficult to get in. I’ve wasted lot of time and energy getting past the gatekeepers.”
Ms. Ramirez said Elite recruits exclusively through word of mouth from other physicians or vendors in the marketplace.
“We’ve developed relationships with vendors who have relationships with the kind of doctors we want — they could be drug reps or work for imaging or physical therapy companies,” she says. “And we go to them and offer referral fees. If I find a physician I like in a market, I find someone he knows who will contact him for me. Instead of hiring sales staff I went out to the market to find people who know doctors. It’s saved me from having to hire sales staff that must go around the country and try to recruit in markets where they don’t know anybody.”
2. Act like a country club. Ms. Ramirez advises ASCs to avoid the temptation of ‘the more the merrier’ strategy.
“We’re very much like a country club,” she says. “For us, the right group is the best group. In a country club, you have to be invited in. I don’t go talk with doctors who my physicians haven’t inquired about or haven’t been referred to me. It works. We don’t recruit any physicians, not even one, who have not been referred from another physician. We get the right group of doctors with synergistic interests who gel and form a true partnership.”
3. Be a matchmaker. “It has to be a good match,” Ms. Ramirez says. “Sometimes they call me the matchmaker. If I see a doctor as a potential problem who does not gel with the partnership, or that the deal does not work for that physician, I will put him or her in touch with another group of physicians.”
She describes a group of physicians who wanted to do a center together and realized early on in the process that they were very synergistic in their beliefs about clinical care but very distant on how to run a business.
“They ended up splitting into two groups that formed two centers and everything worked out well,” she says.
4. Do your due diligence. If a vendor or physician refers Ms. Ramirez to a doctor, she reaches out to contacts in the market to background herself further.
“I do a lot of research, talk to multiple sources, before entering into a relationship with that doctor,” she says.
Ms. Ramirez verifies that the physician possesses top-of-the-line medical training and board certification or eligibility.
“I call other doctors to see how this candidate gets along with peers, the kind of reputation he has and how he plays with others,” she says. “I only look for physicians without multiple ownership interests. Once I make the initial call and meet with the physician, I match make, find out his or her needs and interests, attitudes about in-network versus out of network, interests in sports medicine, physical therapy, what (is he or she) looking for, and try to pair him to the center I think is right for him. Some say you have to be center-specific. But I believe that patients and physicians will drive for the right opportunity.”
Ms. Ramirez says once she’s conducted some advance intelligence work, she reviews the physician’s curriculum vitae, completes a practice profile and introduces the doctor to the existing partners.
“Only once everyone is comfortable do we move forward,” she says.
5. Make sure the candidate is a good bet. “Before the credit crunch and economic collapse we never had to do this, but this is very new: The credit worthiness of the physician, for the first time, is very important,” Ms. Ramirez says. “Banks never used to look at this before, but now are scrutinizing physician credit as they never have before. Now they’re asking about credit records to get financing and those without credit history or with a poor credit record will have trouble getting financing. It’s a sign of the times.”
Ms. Ramirez (lori.yarbrough.ramirez@gmail.com) has worked in the ASC industry for 13 years and recruited more than physicians for projects. Prior to founding Elite Surgical Affiliates based in Houston, she most recently served as senior vice president of United Surgical Partners International. Learn more about Elite Surgical Affiliates at www.elitesurgicalaffiliates.com.
