Physician Recruting - A Book Review: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Physician Recruiting but Were Afraid to Ask

Merritt, Hawkins, & Associates Guide to Physician Recruiting, April 2007, 155 pages, $89 + $12.95 for shipping, 800-967-7790

Every once in a while a book comes down the pike that is worth every cent you pay for it, even though the price may seem high at first glance.

Merritt, Hawkins, & Associates Guide to Physician Recruiting is such a book. It contains information for recruiting doctors you won’t find in such compact form anywhere else. It is based on the Merritt, Hawkins, & Associates 20 years of experience in the recruiting field and on its numerous surveys of young physicians.

This is a no nonsense book. It contains facts on the physician shortage, what doctors want, where they want to settle, what they expect in terms of salaries and benefits, what salaries and benefits are being offered, why foreign medical school graduates are essential to the health care system, what the split is between females and males in various specialties, why locum teens have become an important commodity, what you have to pay doctors for emergency room coverage, how you can persuade doctors to join your group or hospitals, and a cogent introduction on who doctors think and why doctors are different than most other professionals. In short, this book contains everything you might possibly want to know about recruiting doctors.

The book is about physician search as a sequential process, as a kind of physician search safari. It answers these questions: Where do you look when you seek a physician? Will it be hard to find the right physician? Who else is looking? What are the legalities involved? What’s your game plan? Who’s on your safari team? What kind of pay and benefits should you offer? What resources do you need? The book is not only valuable for the hunter, but for the hunted. If you’re a physician being recruited, you will find more information here than anywhere else I know.

Finally, the book brims with information you may not have known:
Did you know?

•There will be a projected shortage of 200,000 doctors by 2020

•The five major causes for physician turnover once you have recruiting them

•The return of investment and efficiency gains of physicians who invest in specialty
hospitals

•The base salaries/guarantees being offered to physicians

•The average incomes generated by physicians by specialty for hospitals

•The physicians and types of physicians required per 100,000 population

•Overhead as a percent of income in practices.

•The percent of residents who are female in various specialties

•The number of international medical graduates by specialty

•The percent and size of hospitals recruiting doctors

•Salaries being offered as indicated in various compensation surveys

•The IRS/HHS/Stark recruiting regulations.

I thought not. You will find this and other hard-to-find nuggets of information between this little volume’s covers. If you’re looking for just the right doctors for just the right price for just the right reasons, buy this book, read it, absorb it, pass it around.