Don't sit on feedback from new medical staff members

Rosemary Dragon, CPMSM, CPCS, medical staff coordinator of OrthoColorado Hospital/St. Anthony Hospital, in Lakewood, Colorado, further illustrates how MSPs can foster collaboration during practitioner orientation, and reveals how these efforts have played out at OrthoColorado Hospital. The following exchange has been adapted from HCPro's recent webcast, Welcome Aboard: Successfully Navigating Practitioner Orientation, available now on demand.

Q: We're updating our follow-up process so new physicians can tell us what was useful and what we can do to improve orientation. Do you offer incentives for the physicians to respond, or have any advice on when we should follow up?

A: The main incentive that we use to get the physicians to respond is making sure they know that we really are listening, we will make changes, and we will follow up with any information that they've requested.

So often‑and you may have experienced this yourself‑we are asked for our input and feedback, and then we feel that nobody has done anything with that information; that it is not valuable. If you already have a program that's set up to capture some of that follow-up as you orient new providers, share what you have specifically done with the feedback that you've received from other people. This will help new providers to trust you. They're going to be more likely to spend 5‑20 minutes providing comments, because they know that you're actually going to act on those comments, because you've done so with previous providers.

We haven't given new providers any sort of additional incentive, aside from just knowing that we want to work with them, we want them to have a voice in our facility, we want to accommodate the needs that they have, and this is one of many venues that they have to do so.