Running a clinic is challenging. You must provide all your patients with the utmost quality of care. However, logistics sometimes gets in the way. Providing high-quality care and service depends primarily on hiring the right people to do the job, which is more complicated than it sounds.

Your clinic needs good healthcare providers and physicians, receptionists, and billing staff. Even if only one of those wasn’t up to your standards, they can negatively impact your patients’ experience and affect their decision to return to your clinic.

Identify Your Needs

When hiring for your clinic, you need to determine the exact positions you need to fill in your clinic. Then, you need to pinpoint what type of person with what experience is the best choice. Taking time to go through this process for every position you’re hiring for can save you time and frustration in the future due to making the wrong staffing decisions.

Know Where to Look

High-quality workers are at high-quality job boards and networking events. Avoid posting ads on free job boards, where hundreds, if not thousands, will see the job listing and apply even if they’re grossly underqualified.

Stick to professional networking events, and post jobs and credible job boards, such as LinkedIn and Indeed. You can also opt to post strictly on job boards made for medical professionals such as Health eCareers, MedicalJobs.org, and Hospital Careers.

Get to the Heart of Healthcare

Academic qualifications and achievements aren’t the only qualities you should look for in a recruit. It’s vital that the staff, especially physicians, have excellent communication skills to understand their patients properly in healthcare. They also need to be companionate, nonjudgmental, and professional with their patients regardless of the situations or a patient’s condition and circumstances. The same applies to staff in non-physician roles in your clinic, such as finances and billing.

A trial period can help you determine if a new staff member has the qualities your clinic needs. However, there are a few things you can ask and do in an interview to get a clear picture of the person you’re hiring:

• Propose various hypothetical scenarios to see how they would react.
• Ask them how they’d handle a medical emergency or a stressful situation.
• Ask how they stay up-to-date with the latest findings in the healthcare industry.
• Ask about the worst situation they’ve faced during their work and how they handled it.
• Try to keep a casual tone rather than an unnervingly formal interview.
• See if they understand vague patient communication and how they can get the right information from them.
• Check if they get along with the rest of your staff.

How the candidate answers those questions can give you a glimpse into their skills, work ethic, and ability to work effectively with you, your staff, and your patients. Before settling on a candidate, don’t hesitate to ask for more than one interview with the same candidate if you end up having further questions after the first one.

Consider Co-sourcing

When it comes to medical billing, things can be very complicated. The average billing process in a clinic splits into multiple steps that can be very time and detail sensitive. One way to avoid falling behind on your billing is to co-source the process.

Co-sourcing means your clinic partially outsources the parts of your billing process that your staff can’t handle in-house. You co-source by contracting a third-party business specializing in medical billing, like Precision Medical Billing, for example, letting them take care of agreed-upon tasks for a set fee.

You can also outsource to a company that specializes in staff augmentation for healthcare facilities. That can cut back on the time and energy you’d otherwise have to invest in searching for qualified candidates for your practice. NextGen staff augmentation consultants can take care of most of the work for you, guaranteeing that you only get the best candidates, where all you have to do is approve them.

Don’t Compromise

The healthcare industry is one of the most sensitive industries to staffing requirements, as people go to clinics when they aren’t at their best. Don’t compromise with hiring a subpar candidate just because you’re starting or don’t have time to run more interviews. Make sure only to employ individuals who share your vision of how your clinic should run. That’ll ensure your patients only receive the highest quality care.