Want to Engage Physicians? Listen to Them
// By Marcia Simon, APR //
Your communications team works hard to produce content that engages physicians. The problem is that your clinicians may completely ignore it. How do you get them to pay attention?
Recruiting, retaining, and communicating effectively with your attending physicians affects everything from patient satisfaction and operating costs to hospital reputation and safety. As health care networks get bigger, communication to an expanding employee base becomes a growing challenge.
Communication teams today work to get pertinent news to clinical departments throughout their networks as efficiently as possible. The problem with this is that doctors don’t really care what’s happening across the network; they care about their specialty and their hospital. They didn’t sign up to hear about enterprise solutions that don’t directly relate to their workflow, according to Jim Blazar, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at Hackensack Meridian Health.
Hackensack Meridian is New Jersey’s largest integrated health care network, with more than 6,500 physicians working across 17 hospitals and 500 patient care locations. The system needed to create a solid strategy for physician communication.
“We needed a solution that would work well not just across the network, but also at any one facility, one specialty at a time,” explains Blazar.