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Medical Staff Planning and Community Needs Assessment |
As demand for physicians increases faster than supply, and physicians are increasingly interested in being employed, hospitals and health systems need to effectively target limited staff development resources to attract and retain the right physicians. DGA Partners can help in both the internal and regulatory aspects of planning for medical staff development.
When the hospital needs to look at its broad physician landscape, assessing strategic requirements for primary care and specialty physician resources, the right approach is a comprehensive medical staff development plan.
Medical Staff Planning
DGA’s medical staff planning process integrates quantitative analysis with qualitative understanding of the hospital's medical staff environment and development needs. We start with a rigorous quantitative market analysis, which may include:
- Compiling an accurate physician inventory (commercially available databases average 50% accuracy)
- Providing "over-the-horizon" primary care and specialty physician need projections
Then we look at the impact of critical medical staff dynamics, practice patterns and unmet referral needs on medical staff needs. We identify the number and type of physicians required to strengthen core programs, replace retiring physicians, support new ventures and establish new markets.
DGA has successfully completed significantly more than a hundred medical staff planning engagements for community, teaching and academic medical center hospitals.
Implementing Medical Staff Development Programs
We develop pragmatic implementation strategies (and tactics, where appropriate) to recruit and attract new physicians. We also provide legal counsel with support in incorporating an approved medical staff development plan into the staff application and credentialing process.
Physician Community Needs Assessment
When the institution needs to drill down to the details of community and internal physician resources related to a specific specialty or program, in order to be able to offer financial assistance to newly recruited physicians, a physician community need study is the answer. The standard of documentation is a high one, since the goal is regulatory compliance.
DGA Partners determines community need by performing detailed analyses of supply and demand on a specialty basis. We conduct telephone interviews to uncover factors that require adjustment to practice levels, including time by office location; pending retirements and administrative, supervisory and teaching time. These may convert what seemed to be an adequate supply of physicians to an undersupply, or vice-versa.
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