While the new year started with headlines about a strong jobs report amid a year of healthy hiring throughout many sectors in 2023, the medical group and ambulatory care space might feel like it’s trapped in time, still looking for qualified candidates and strategies to limit turnover in a competitive labor market.
For three years, staffing has ranked as the top challenge or priority for medical group leaders in MGMA Stat polling.
To rise to this challenge, healthcare administrators have shared with MGMA how they have updated and added new employee benefits, revised strategies to recruit and retain medical assistants (MAs) and nurse roles, but the intense competition for healthcare workers remains atop the list of items keeping practice leaders up at night:
- Practice leaders have standardized their approaches to recruiting and prioritizing essential positions over others. This also includes using Lean processes to standardize workflows and paying closer attention to staffing metrics.
- HR leaders have started to create over-hiring plans to avoid unfilled positions and staying fully staffed for more stability amid expected turnover.
- Many have continued or increased use of third-party recruitment services or locum tenens for physicians and advanced practice providers (APPs), particularly for physician assistants (PAs).
- More organizations have embraced offshoring for certain roles, particularly in call centers, prior authorization work and revenue cycle management (RCM) functions.
To aid healthcare leaders in their efforts, this new report reflects on what’s worked and new strategies to improve recruitment, hiring, onboarding, engagement and retention of physicians, APPs, other clinical support staff and nonclinical team members.
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