The Secret to Recruiting Doctors (Psst, It’s CE Enhancement)

Many doctors want to move into your area, so you’re looking for the right candidates, those who are the best fits for your facility.

But you’re finding it hard to recruit: no one’s accepting your offer to come on board.

What could be the problem?

Here’s a little secret: it’s probably your continuing education (CE) enhancement—or rather, the lack thereof.

What are you going to do about that? How does it affect your part in recruiting doctors? Let’s take a look.

Offer Your Candidates a Great CE Package

What exactly are potential doctors looking for when they want to enhance their CE? A robust CE program allows them to:

• Refine their skills to improve their overall patient care.
• Stay current with the latest developments with their specialty or subspecialty.
• Address the challenges they face daily.
• Acquire professional growth and ways to advance their career status.
• Meet critical licensing or certification requirements.
• Learn practical medical team management skills.
• Earn membership in professional bodies.

Provide CE Benefits When Recruiting Doctors

HR departments can put together benefits packages (besides salaries) that include lifestyle flexibility, sign-on bonuses, relocation assistance, medical and dental insurance, disability insurance, paid time off, qualified retirement, and malpractice coverage, as well as CE dues. They also provide an allowance and time off for CE activities.

According to consulting survey company SullivanCotter, annual CE allowances usually range between $3,500 and $5,000. This includes paid time off between five and ten days. Many facilities also pay for some or all of physicians’ professional dues and medical licensure fees through separate reimbursements or as part of their CE allowance.

After all, physicians have to go somewhere for their CE. The numbers don’t lie: the ACCME documented more than 1,760 providers that offered over 179,000 activities. Over 48,873 were internet-enduring materials and 9,583 other enduring materials. There were 4,758 live internet activities.

CE provides support for continuous improvement and learning in order to help doctors address gaps in their education. They also need CE credits for license renewals and certifications, MOCs, memberships in professional societies, and other hospital privileges. As the CE director, this is where you come in. You need a strategy that shouldn’t be a secret.

How to Enhance the CE You Offer

Medical learners are bombarded with information—it just comes with the territory. There are many different types of CE: live CME and regularly scheduled series, like grand rounds, tumor boards, and mortality conferences.

More enduring materials can include online courses, webinars, medical journals, and question banks. Internet materials like interactive educational modules and podcasts are described by the ACCME as online-enduring activities that can be accessed whenever the learner chooses to complete them. There’s no designated timeline that the learner must adhere to, because the content can be accessed at any time during the lifespan of the activity.

You can get quite creative with how you offer your CE when recruiting doctors! Think of the possibilities:

• Provide online, on-demand CE on their devices—it’s there 24/7.
• Offer webinars instead of sleep-inducing text.
• Give them CME credits on the go. Let your learners download free podcasts to their devices to listen to on the way home.
• Offer CE videos online.

Also, consider these incentives if you already haven’t done so:

• Provide CE for a board review in gastroenterology and hepatology for 36.5 hours. Offer a discount on the course.
• Offer CE activities for rheumatologists, with credit hour amounts depending on the course.
• Provide fifty anesthesiology credits with a free gift card
• Offer a cardiology CE at a predetermined cost with a free gift card. The course would provide sixty-five AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ and sixty-five ABIM MOC Points, as well as cardiology board-style questions and cases with detailed explanations. The course would be available for up to twenty-four-month access.

But how will you go about doing all this?

Deploy New Information and Communication Technologies

When you’re a CE director who needs to be recruiting doctors, you can enhance your CE program by deploying new information and communication technologies in your accredited CE programs. Make sure the content works to keep your doctors with you. Technology works well for learner-controlled training, as it addresses diverse learning styles and is ideal for younger physicians who are already well-versed in the digital world.

Use learning methods like the “think-pair-share” form of learning, or blended learning—that is, combining digital and face-to-face formats. If you use forms of social media, games, video, and audio content via webcasts, discussion boards, and other interactive materials, you’re winning. You now have the freedom to develop new learning methods.

The secret is out: There’s technology that can help you enhance your CE and recruit doctors for your CE.

Get an Easy-to-Use LMS Platform for Recruiting Doctors

The key to recruiting doctors is to offer them what they need: CE courses where they can participate in self-directed learning that enables them to earn CE credits on their own terms.

Enter EthosCE. This is an easy-to-use, enterprise-grade LMS platform that provides automated tools to enhance your CE offerings. It has a simple, clean user interface that won’t confuse your learners, so they can concentrate on your content. You’ll improve your course productivity rates because you can build course templates to create more courses with less.

EthosCE gives you assessment tools, like quizzes and surveys, that enable you to assess learner knowledge at any time during a course. Users can choose from multiple-choice, true-false, essay, and other common question types. When your courses are ready, the streamlined interface allows your learners to navigate your content through any web browser.

EthosCE also supports online learning registration and communication for your in-person and online training events. You can keep your learners engaged before, during, and after a CE program via online discussion forums, peer-to-peer networking, social media, reminders, and follow-up surveys.

The Secret’s Out: It’s All Good with EthosCE

EthosCE is the go-to LMS used by medical associations, academic medical centers, health systems, and medical education companies. We help you recruit and retain the best physicians who need your CE. We provide you with the tools for curriculum development that lets you offer the right training to your learners. This way, there are positive experiences all around, especially for you when you’re enhancing your CE.

EthosCE believes CME technology solutions should be designed to improve healthcare professionals’ user experience, comply with ACCME guidelines, reduce administrative costs, and demonstrate measurable outcomes.

Don’t let your CE enhancement be a secret. Get in touch with EthosCE for a free 1-on-1 demo with one of our specialists today!