Wisdom Blog

Physician burnout is on the rise, and we need a solution. Learn about the main causes, symptoms, and what you can do about it.

We’re in a Candidate-Driven Market in the Wellness Industry There are already way more medical practices hiring in the U.S. Wellness industry than there are qualified candidates to fill the roles. That’s only the beginning. One of our Five 2020 Wellness Predictions is that there will be a mass exodus of allopathic medical practitioners realigning themselves for Wellness specialities. Top talent in this candidate-driven market are holding all the cards! Navigating talented healthcare and wellness practitioners into their best roles in Functional, Integrative and Lifestyle Medicine requires expert knowledge, insight, connections and finesse. Here are five tips to enable your practice to stand out… Treat Your Candidates Like GOLD Great candidates deliver so much more than just potential employment. Not only may they ultimately be influencing your culture as an employee, but they can become a great referral source for you, should this not be the right fit for them.  Always leave them knowing, no matter what, that they have great value to offer your practice or that of another. The golden rule must apply here. Positive referrals are some of the best sources for new candidates. If you keep them feeling like gold throughout the recruitment process, they will be more likely to refer colleagues to your company whether they are hired by you or not. Be Diligent with Your Recruiting Timeline Top talent are highly sought after and candidates will not stick around if weeks go by without moving the ball forward toward a decision.  Everyone’s time is valuable. This includes the way you communicate with them, as well as the timeliness of your replies. Do not leave them waiting and wondering where they stand in the recruiting process.  If you are waiting on something and don’t have anything new to share, send a quick email letting them know you haven’t forgotten them. Err on the side of over-communicating. If there are delays, let them know you are waiting for additional information and will get back with them soon.  You are looking for a Provider, they are looking for a new Employer. Licensure and necessary credentialing should be the longest part of the process, scheduling their next round of interviews should not. Keep the recruiting process tight … other practices and recruiters are calling them too! Culture, Culture, Culture… Be Authentic and Share Aggressively market the reasons why your practice is a great place to work. Utilize your “Careers” page to let them know what it’s like to work in your practice through curated storytelling. Let them discover your culture through your  messaging. Your Careers page needs to link to places where candidates can learn about your culture. Your current employees are your best resource for communicating your practice’s culture so, use that powerful content to attract top talent.  Adding videos or employee testimonials to your website is a great place to start. Create an employer brand that embraces your culture and strategy. Your job descriptions should have your values, brand and culture embedded in them. Be sure your Careers page links to places where candidates can learn about your culture. Engage Wellness-savvy marketing consultants like ours to help you polish up your cultural brand, as well as your job descriptions and pitched to candidates. Quality of Work Life is Key Your workplace must be FUN and your employees must feel VALUED. Incorporating a wellness program and a perks program beyond the typical PTO and retirement program, will yield huge returns and make it harder to jump ship when another offer comes along based solely on compensation.  Research the companies that make it on the “Best Places to Work” lists in your area and emulate their programs. Many of these perks have little or no cost, but go a long way toward boosting morale, strengthening culture and attracting the best candidates. Employees remain loyal when they feel valued beyond just their job roles. Stay Proactive with Your Hiring Plans Don’t wait until your hair is on fire and you need a practitioner in place YESTERDAY to reach out to a professional recruiter.  Our networks and outreach of top talent cannot be compared. Passing this responsibility to your Office Manager, Practice Manager, or another employee only adds to their workload and often times, burns up valuable time lost in finding qualified candidates.  Find a recruiter in your industry that has matching values to you and your practice and which you feel confident will represent the opportunity to prospective candidates in the best possible way. Job boards are fine and should definitely have a purpose but are too passive. Also, often the best candidates are not looking for jobs. They need to be found and recruited.  Your practice needs a much more proactive strategy to find this top talent that is currently in the driver’s seat. #wellnessrevolution #functionalmedicine #lifestylemedicine #integrativemedicine #lifecyclehealth #mindbodytalent #mindbody #talent #recruiting #recruitment

Your Web Presence – Fueling or Failing Your Wellness Practice? Here’s a bold but probably very true statement … your internet presence is most likely failing your health services practice. That means failing to meet the needs of your practice as well as failing the patients who need your services. By “Internet presence” we mean your website, your social media activity, online advertising, video publishing and any other digital means you use to create awareness about your practice and your specialties as a practitioner. We can make that statement with confidence because we’ve been actively engaged with healthcare industry marketing since the earliest days of the internet. We are highly tuned to analyze, diagnose, recommend and implement remedies for Healthcare, Wellness and Senior Living industry websites, social media channels and digital advertising campaigns. Almost every medical practice has a website these days; frankly very few of them are good. Don’t feel too bad if yours isn’t great because you’re not alone in your profession. In our experience, most healthcare web properties fall far short of accomplishing the needs of medical practices and wellness centers, as well as for the patients they serve. In order to fully do justice to your important life’s work, your presence on the web must not only fulfill the technical requirements of the internet, it must also communicate the spirit of your vital role in the much-needed revolution in healthcare. Two Topics – Powerful Leverage for Your Practice This is a two-part article covering essential sister topics that are critical to the success of your medical practice, as well as to your individual success as an administrator or practitioner in the field of Functional and Integrative Medicine. (1) The first article is about your need for a brand and a platform, “Building a Great Wellness Brand”. (2) This article, “Building Great Web Presence” is about how your presence on the internet can either make or break your ability to stand out as a unique practitioner of wellness services. You’ve invested heavily in the education and career specialties of your practice. These two crucial tips will maximize your return on those investments. The Patient/Practitioner Relationship has Changed Radically For most people of adult age today, the doctor/patient relationship in western countries has followed a pretty simple process for most of our lives … get sick or injured … find a general medicine physician or one who specializes in your therapeutic issue AND who accepts your insurance plan … get a diagnosis and prescription from him or her … take the pharmaceutical medication or therapeutic recommendation … rinse and repeat for each illness or malady. Two phenomena have changed that landscape entirely: 1) The rise of the internet as a health information resource 2) The rise of Functional and Integrative Medicine driving the healthcare revolution The Internet’s Power Over Your Practice The rise of the internet as a health and wellness information resource has made skills in digital marketing more important than ever for medical practices, especially for practices and practitioners committed to Functional and Integrative Medicine. According to research from McKinsey & Company, over 80% of consumers view digital solutions as the best way to meet their healthcare needs. Over 80% of healthcare consumers make their physician choices online prior to reaching out to a practice. If your online presence isn’t stellar, you don’t even know which patients you’re missing. Patient use of the internet includes finding doctors, checking health information, and monitoring health metrics. Other studies confirm that up to 85% of patient decisions to choose a care provider happen before they ever contact a practice. That means that your story told through the internet must be clear and compelling or you risk never seeing the face of patients who need your expertise. Beyond acquiring patients, the McKinsey research and other similar studies show that keeping patients is also heavily dependent on you having a website that confirms the treatments you prescribe and supports patient decisions to come back for more. Seven Typical Points of Website Failure and Risk Given the rapidly changing trends in the internet and its role in the consumerization of healthcare and Wellness, there are seven primary points of failure and risk that we typically find when analyzing Healthcare and Wellness industry websites: 1) Branding and Story-Telling Beyond your medical competencies and credentials, patients and their advocates want and need to know your story. It’s no longer enough to have an MD, DO, PhD, PA or NP behind your name. Patients and their caregivers want to know the “why” behind your “what”. Our sister article, “Building a Great Wellness Brand” describes exactly why that is critical to today’s health and wellness consumers. It also provides guidelines on what to do about it to the benefit of your practice. 2) Differentiation and Uniqueness The fields of health management and wellness are getting more and more crowded with practitioners offering tradition, allopathic services, as well as a wide range innovative solutions to addressing and preventing chronic illness. If your internet presence doesn’t clearly differentiate your practice and specialties, then the patients you want to attract won’t be able to find you through the fog and noise of a very loud marketplace. As we profiled in “Building a Great Wellness Brand” that challenge is even greater for practices and practitioners in the fields of Functional and Integrative Medicine. 3) Ensuring Security If you look at the bar where your website address appears in internet browsers, you’ll see several symbols that signify the security of your website and the data it manages. Those symbols not only indicate to your site visitors that it’s safe to browse your website. They also mean something very significant to your presence on the internet. Beginning in 2014, Google and other search engines began excluding websites in search results if those websites don’t contain proper security. Google’s policies have progressively become more restrictive over the last five years. Way more than half of the health and wellness websites we review don’t

Two Topics – Powerful Leverage for Your Practice This is a two-part article covering essential sister topics that are critical to the success of your medical practice, as well as to your individual success as an administrator or practitioner in the field of Functional and Integrative Medicine. (1) This first article is about your need for a brand and a platform, “Building a Great Wellness Brand“. (2) The second is about how your presence on the internet can either make or break your ability to stand out as a unique supplier of wellness products and services, “Building Great Web Presence“. The Essentials of Branding and Platforms for Wellness Professionals Differentiation in any industry is difficult. Standing out as a unique provider of Functional and Integrative Medicine services is exponentially more complicated. In the rapidly evolving fields of healthcare and wellness, you need a brand and a platform that enables you to promote and propel your brand. You’ve invested heavily in the education and career specialties of your practice. These two vital tips will maximize your return on those investments. New Translation of the Archimedes Principle In the 3rd century BC, Archimedes of Syracuse famously said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”. The modern equivalent is, “Give me a brand and a platform from which to project it and I shall move the world”. Marketing experts across every industry stress the need for corporate brands, personal brands and “platforms” to give your brand a voice. These factors are essential for success in today’s noisy world. That challenge is even more difficult for practices and practitioners offering Functional and Integrative Medicine services. This article profiles that complexity and offers solutions that benefits providers and patients alike. Four Key Reasons Why Your Differentiation is Hard Work 1) Building Trust and Dispelling the “Alternative Therapy” Myth – Let’s face some hard truths … at least four or five generations of Americans have been indoctrinated into the belief that they can trust traditional, allopathic medical doctors, including the treatments they prescribe. Simultaneously, we’ve all heard the myth that doctors of osteopathy, chiropractic doctors and “alternative therapy” practitioners are “quacks”. Somehow, the medical and healing practices that worked for thousands of years became discredited “alternative” therapies and quackery upon the birth of modern medicine and pharmaceutical science. This dual mythology makes for a very steep hill to climb for you in building trust and credibility with patients. Meanwhile, the perception of trust is often already baked in with your traditional medicine counterparts. The majority of allopathic medicine physicians (MD), nurse practitioners (NP), physician assistants (PA) and therapists already have the inherent trust of their patients, which gives them the luxury of focusing solely on their practice. On the contrary, you carry the extra burden of constantly climbing the trust and credibility mountain while also focusing on helping your patients. 2) The Job of Curing People is Hard – The path you’ve chosen to actually cure people of chronic illnesses and acute conditions is a far more difficult road to travel than merely treating symptoms with pharmaceuticals and surgery. Therefore, the story you must tell about your methods, protocols and range of treatment modalities is far more complex. Quickly and efficiently conveying those messages to an often-skeptical population requires experience, skill and finesse. That professional competency is the art and science of marketing. 3) Patients are Getting Smarter and More Discerning – The Internet has turned everyone into a health expert. For any given symptom, a few minutes of Google searching will bring back libraries full of information, as well as speculation about what that symptom might mean. By the time your prospective patients reach your website, they are already armed with loads of information that they will compare against your specialties and credentials. Studies show that up to 85% of patient decisions to choose a care provider happen before they ever contact a practice. Your story must be clear and compelling to convince these discerning patients and their families to choose you. 4) Competition is Fierce and Getting More So – The expanding diversity of treatment modalities and methods is creating a broader and more complex set of decision choices for patients and their advocates. Savvy practitioners and therapists are finding more and more creative ways to tell their stories about why they’ve got the better approach. Your message must slice through that fog to clearly differentiate your practice and unique range of specialties. The Power of Why – Communicating Your Passion Perhaps the biggest reason to build your brand and platform is what the master marketing strategist, Simon Sinek calls “Start with Why”. According to Sinek, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not just to motivate people who need what you have, the goal is to inspire people who believe what you believe.”6 The process of developing your brand forces you to think about and articulate what you believe. Communicating what you believe will inspire and motivate patients to want the unique services you provide. To illustrate this point, we’ll profile how we constructed the “why” and brand of MindBody Talent. We understand that “what” MindBody Talent delivers is five categories of services that we provide to Functional and Integrative Medicine practices and practitioners: (1) executive recruiting, (2) strategy consulting, (3) coaching and training, (4) branding and marketing, and (5) technology solutions. That combination of services may make us unique in our chosen markets, but what makes those service lines really compelling is “why” we deliver them. What We Believe – The Driver of Our Passion We believe in the need to transform the fields of healthcare and wellness through the application of Functional and Integrative Medicine solutions. We believe that our country is long overdue for a revolution in healthcare. And we understand that our role is to help fuel that revolution by providing our services to Functional and Integrative