Is your facility gearing up for an influx of locum tenens providers? Before locum tenens physicians can perform their jobs, it’s important that you equip them with the necessary knowledge and skills to make meaningful contributions to your medical team. This requires proactive measures to speed up orientation for locum tenens providers so that workflow and patient care are not compromised.
Here are some tips for how you can onboard locum tenens physicians as efficiently as possible:
Streamline your onboarding process.
The main goal of employing a locum tenens physician is to ensure your facility can maintain optimal productivity and staffing levels. Therefore, having an efficient onboarding process is critical to making sure your locum tenens providers can perform their jobs with little disruption and interference. You can streamline onboarding by having standard orientation protocols in place to educate and inform locum tenens physicians about what they need to know about your facility. This involves a formalized training of your facility’s codes and procedures, as well as offering a full tour if needed.
Establish a pre-credentialing process.
One of the most important steps you can take in getting locum tenens physicians quickly up to speed is to develop standardized pre-credentialing. Establishing a process for which locum tenens can complete their credentialing before their assignment begins, can save a significant amount of time and aggravation, allowing more time for locum tenens providers to complete other critical elements of the onboarding process once they arrive on site. You can do this by requiring locum tenens physicians to prepare documentation ahead of time, as well as receive background and drug tests in advance.
Integrate locum tenens providers within your team.
One of the best ways to take advantage of a locum tenens workforce is to immediately integrate locum tenens physicians within your team. This is done in a multitude of ways, from incorporating locum tenens staff in team meetings to adding them to all communications channels. Making sure your locum tenens providers are treated as an extension of your existing medical units will ultimately improve the trajectory of patient care, as well as how your team functions as a whole.
The more organized and streamlined your facility is in handling the matters above, the quicker you’ll be able to acclimate locum tenens physicians to your facility and serve the needs of your patients.
