Why You Should Be Hiring From Outside Healthcare
Many things about traditional healthcare are broken. And for those of us trained in the industry, so often we’ve been indoctrinated with a discouraging thought: That’s just the way things are.
But as concierge and DPC practices, you’ve started to break the mold. You looked at the subpar experience of both patients and physicians, and decided to make a change for the better.
The question now is, where else could we be innovating that our industry training and background prevent us from seeing?
This is where a fresh set of eyes can help.
Practices may be understandably wary of bringing in staff without a medical background. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you hire an RN or a medical assistant without the necessary pedigree. But not all positions require a person to have a healthcare background.
In fact, as we’ll discuss below, they might even benefit from not having one.
Attract a Fresh Perspective
Great leaders always try to attract talent from outside their industry because a fresh mindset, a fresh set of eyes, can come in and turn the status quo on its head.
Outsiders bring value simply because they notice the barriers people have been walking past unseeingly for years. To an industry native, a certain barrier might as well be a concrete wall. To an outsider, it’s just a temporary roadblock that a little ingenuity can move out of the way.
Smart and capable people have tackled problems outside of healthcare much bigger than the ones we face.
In the financial technology space, for example, they knew people wanted to fly to other countries and use their credit cards to pay for lunch. So they found innovative solutions to make international payment processing both secure and easy.
Yet when it comes to healthcare information, if you visit an ER in the wrong health system — in the same city where you live, work, and see your doctor — no one knows you’re allergic to penicillin.
How can our sensitive financial information travel so seamlessly around the globe, but our electronic medical records struggle to cross the street? And why has our industry accepted that?
We need a fresh set of eyes. We need people who look at problems differently, people who have solved similar problems in other industries that closely parallel the problems we’ve been trained to view as insurmountable in healthcare.
That being the case, how do we entice people from other industries to join us?
Start With Why
Simon Sinek, in his TED Talk about how great leaders inspire action, encourages people to start with “why?”
Making money is important for survival, but it doesn’t provide a sense of purpose. People in the banking industry might make a lot of money, but that’s it — their job is just to make money. After a while, many come to realize it’s not enough.
We’re in the middle of the Great Resignation. People are burned out and leaving their jobs. They’re looking for meaning beyond a paycheck.
We have the opportunity to attract this top talent looking for fulfillment. Why? Because we’re in the service of caring for people. We improve our “customers’” quality of life. We give a mom two more years with her kids. We help sick children get better.
Not much is more fulfilling than making a difference in somebody’s life — or saving it.
That’s a pretty powerful why. And beyond healthcare generally, concierge practices are already bucking the status quo to make an even bigger difference in the lives of their patients.
It’s an exciting space that can attract talented people looking for meaning behind their careers.
Not All Roles Need a Medical Background
Healthcare is a precise industry, and not everyone is sure they want to take on the risk of training non-medical staff on things like HIPAA and PHI.
So, you may be tempted to reject outside hiring and require that everyone start out healthcare savvy.
But not every role demands a healthcare background. In fact, you might find that you don’t want certain roles to be healthcare savvy.
Take the role of patient care coordinator (PCC), for example. Since PCCs help patients along their care continuum, you might think they need to understand all the stops along the way, everything from MRIs to blood cultures.
The truth? It can actually be better for that PCC to have a knowledge boundary.
Why? Because personally, I prefer the physician be the one explaining medical tests, terms, conditions, etc. to patients. A PCC who doesn’t know the answer — and knows they don’t know the answer — doesn’t make guesses in response to patient questions. They easily recognize when they need to invite the physician into the discussion to play the role physicians are supposed to play.
It’s true that you can find office staff with a Master of Healthcare Administration who already understand the rules and regulations that govern a healthcare business. And that’s fine. But you may still miss out on the fresh perspective that expertise from another field entirely can bring.
Just because formal training and career paths exist for office roles doesn’t mean you have to limit your hiring to those pools exclusively.
Three Perfect Roles for People New to Healthcare
Below are three examples of roles that don’t require a medical background.
Patient Care Coordinator
PCCs ensure that patients have everything they need when they come for their first visit.
If we’re doing a medication brown bag, the PCC makes sure the patient brings all their medications to the visit. They remind patients they’re scheduled for a blood draw on Tuesday before their appointment on Friday, and make sure they know where to go. They follow up with patients when the physician prescribes a medication and let them know when it’s ready at the pharmacy.
Broadly, the PCC’s job is to make being a patient easier and facilitate great care from the physician.
PCCs are consumers of healthcare, too (we all are). As patients, they know the pain points of traditional healthcare firsthand, and as patient care coordinators, they’re able to transform that typical, nightmarish experience into something smooth and pleasant.
We had a great discussion on patient care coordinators in one of our ROAMD members-only community conversations, during which Joan McManus shared some of Private Medical’s experience with PCCs and drawing from outside industries.
Where To Find the Talent
Someone with a background as a tour guide at Disney or a national park could make an excellent PCC. They have experience shepherding people along a continuum and providing a great experience in the process.
School teachers also make great patient care coordinators. They have tremendously long fuses and tons of patience when it comes to educating.
Executive or personal assistants are also good options. They’re used to providing high-level service and they know when to defer to the physician on matters beyond their expertise.
Director of Patient Experience / Practice Manager
The bar for patient experience in healthcare is already incredibly low, so this is one low-hanging fruit area where concierge medicine can make a huge difference. Not surprisingly, some of the best directors of patient experience have a background not in healthcare, but in hospitality.
Someone who’s run the concierge desk at a five-star hotel knows better than anyone what it takes to deliver five-star customer service, much of which involves the skill of predicting needs and wants.
I once had the privilege of listening to a talk by Horst Schulze, the founder of the Ritz Carlton. He talked about the early days of the Ritz, when the concept of luxury was defined by what was on the walls and on the floor, like artwork and nice rugs.
By the time he left the Ritz many years later, luxury was knowing that a certain guest liked her room at 71 degrees and didn’t want feather pillows on her bed.
Luxury had changed from aesthetic features to knowing what specific guests liked and anticipating their needs. Luxury became about the way people were treated, about understanding them as individuals.
That’s the kind of luxury we embody in concierge medicine. This doesn’t mean we only serve high-net-worth individuals. It means we take the time and make the effort to understand people as human beings, treat them with the utmost respect, know them as well as anybody in their life knows them, and meet their particular needs.
Yes, the office aesthetic is important, but the way we treat patients is paramount. When we start to think like a hotel concierge, we take a new look at what patients will need during their visits, the way we communicate information to them, and how we coordinate our varied team.
The director of patient experience ensures that communication is clear, concise, and timely. Patients receive the information they need when they need it in the format they like.
For example, in an office with a multidisciplinary team, a patient might see a massage therapist, dietitian, RN, and physician all on the same day. Do they leave with conflicting marching orders or a well-coordinated, interdisciplinary plan? The director of patient experience helps the office present a united front for the patient’s benefit.
A good director of patient experience also knows which patients prefer video chat, which need reminders, and which prefer paper over emails.
Understanding patients in such detail and treating them accordingly doesn’t require a healthcare background. In fact, it may be best to avoid a healthcare background because so few from the healthcare industry know how to do this well.
Where To Find the Talent
The hospitality industry is an excellent source of talent for directors of patient experience, but other industries that excel at customer service are good options as well.
Flight attendants, for example, understand what it means to deliver first class care.
People with a lot of experience working in stadium suites and luxury boxes in the professional sports or entertainment worlds also have a deep understanding of coordinated, luxury service.
Chief Operating Officer
You can source a great COO for a concierge practice from other industries.
COOs working in business understand the inner workings of a larger organization and can bring big business mentality, efficiency, and growth concepts to an otherwise much smaller company. They understand what it means to have large, systems-level processes in place and Six Sigma Black Belt efficiency.
A COO with a healthcare background likely brings along lots of baggage from the industry. You’re building something far outside the healthcare norm, so it’s better to find someone who sees opportunities, not roadblocks.
Where To Find the Talent
COOs can come from any background where growing and scaling a business is valued.
You can look for people who’ve managed large teams and complex organizations in areas like retail, finance, or technology. Here again, the hospitality industry or other operational-minded backgrounds are good.
What’s important is to draw from business-to-consumer models rather than business-to-business models. Consumer-centric businesses better understand what it means — and what it costs — to deliver the high-quality service your practice brings to market.
More Than a Theory
Many practices in the ROAMD community have enjoyed success with hiring from outside healthcare.
Dr. Laura Balda at Balda Health, for example, hired her practice manager from the hospitality industry.
Priority Physicians pulled their COO from Target.
Private Medical’s director of patient experience came from the famed five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel. Her strong background in hospitality was instrumental in inspiring the practice to start concierge medicine to begin with. On our podcast with Dr. Jordan Shlain, he talks about how she completely changed his perspective, thanks to her unique background (starting around minute 11).
Some of us probably already have experience with outside hiring, both good and bad. How do you hire staff? What has your experience been hiring from inside and outside healthcare? What are some possible talent pools that we missed?
We welcome you to share some of your experiences and ideas with the community!
Dr. Scott Pope serves as the Chief Growth Officer at In Scope Ventures, a growth consulting firm focused on early stage healthcare companies. Scott is passionate about healthcare entrepreneurship and has been involved in various advocacy efforts to promote innovation in the industry.
Scott earned his PharmD from Ohio Northern University, where he participated in Habitat for Humanity, Phi Mu Delta, Order of Omega, and NCAA basketball. After graduating from ONU, Scott completed a pharmacy residency at Cone Health, followed by a specialty residency in infectious diseases, internal medicine, and academics at Campbell University and Duke University Medical Center.
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