Welcoming a new physician to your hospital’s medical staff is always an exciting time, especially if they are a rockstar provider with a rare skill set and deep expertise in a highly specialized area. It’s also a hectic, often challenging time for several departments, including human resources, credentialing and compliance, marketing, and administration, who are all coordinating to ensure the new physician is well-integrated and positioned for success from Day 1.
One of our fastest-growing hospital partners, based out of Nashville, continuously found themselves in this exact scenario. Just last year, demand for patient care across their 60+ facilities soared to new heights, and they hired at least 80 new providers over a 12-month span. Their team dove head-first into all the traditional, proven tactics to lay the groundwork for these new physicians: local speaking engagements, welcome posters, and introductory videos–all the things. But, they also added a new, never-been-done-before tactic to their strategy: Doximity’s Physician Onboarding solution.
Physician Onboarding is one of Doximity’s newest solutions, and it aligned perfectly with this partner’s goal: expediting new hires to market. No problem!
We got right to work, developing 160 customized marketing programs to niche audiences for 80 new physicians. Each new hire was announced via a sponsored article within the Doximity newsfeed, which was paired with a personalized physician-to-physician message. Strategically, we ensured the audiences for these two channels overlapped. And the results were incredible!
Reaching physicians with both a sponsored article and a direct message drove deeper connections between the new hire and their new connections, who could be potential referrers. In fact, physicians who saw the article headline and received the message connected at twice the rate of those who didn’t see the headline. And, physicians who read the article and received the message connected almost three times more than those who had just received a message.
Since a crucial element of success is a new physician’s ability to make connections and build a robust referral network, we were thrilled to see such high connection rates from these introductory programs. We were even more excited to hear the continued impact of our efforts after the completion of these programs:
“Physician Onboarding has helped us expedite relationship building between new physician hires and potential referrers, which is essential for patient volume growth."
Tips for Physician Onboarding Success
If you have new physician hires, get ahead of the game with these two quick tips:
Before launching marketing programs for your new provider, ensure their Doximity profile is thoroughly updated with a recent headshot, specialty and subspecialty information, and hospital affiliation. Since the Doximity profile functions as a default CV of record, physicians should make sure that all of their work history, training, skills, and publications are up-to-date. In addition, the Summary at the top of the page is a great way to spotlight interests, patient treatment philosophies, professional associations, honors, and any other personal information. Accurate, detailed information benefits both referring physicians and patients searching for physicians via the U.S. News website.
Your new standout physician has earned his or her reputation for good reason. Explore their past achievements. Have they led any clinical trials or significant research studies? What articles have they published? Have they pioneered any cutting-edge techniques? Use this wealth of information to highlight why they are a valuable asset to patients in your local community. This is an excellent way to generate meaningful and useful content for future marketing programs.
Whatever growth mode your organization is in, Doximity can help facilitate a smooth transition for your new physicians.