How Lean Principles Can Help Healthcare Providers Improve Physician Recruiting and Onboarding
September 12th, 2013 2 Min readCompHealth works with medical facilities around the country to fill their staffing needs. As a member of the national locum tenens accounts team, I've had the privilege to work with many of our larger hospital clients. For many of these facilities, their size and complexity makes multi-specialty physician recruiting and onboarding particularly intricate and complicated.
Because CompHealth places thousands of physicians in locum tenens assignments every year, we've learned over time how to become as efficient as possible in these processes -- but not without some help. Several years ago, we discovered the power of Lean to become more productive and increase value for our clients.
Since then, CompHealth has made continuous improvement a part of our culture, dedicating an entire team to implementing the Lean methodology to improve our processes. The team's purpose is to facilitate core business improvements using lean tools such as value stream mapping and rapid improvement events called kaizens. Though Lean manufacturing began in auto manufacturing with the Toyota production system, the principles apply to any industry.
As a staffing provider, Lean has enabled us to better serve our providers and clients through focus on quality of service, speed of execution, and optimization. As a healthcare provider, Lean can help you minimize time to fill open positions, streamline credentialing and onboarding, and provide more timely access to healthcare for patients.
In recent years, we've started partnering with our clients to create more efficient physician recruiting value streams. Melissa Byington, president of CompHealth locum tenens, blogged about this for Physicians Practice.
CompHealth's brand promise is that we have the best people to help provide the best healthcare. In other words, we realize that our clients and providers are part of our value stream (as we are part of theirs), and when we reduce waste in the overall value stream, quality increases and patient populations receive a better healthcare experience.
It's important to note that value stream mapping and kaizens aren't reserved for complex organizations. Any medical facility, from the largest health system to the smallest independent practice, can benefit from Lean continuous improvement.
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