Across the country, hospitals are suffering. Patient revenues are down. Investment portfolios have tanked. Large capital construction projects are being delayed. Staff is being cut.
But despite recessionary times, hospitals are still hiring doctors. In other high end employment realms, even lawyers are getting pink slips, but docs are still very much in demand. The enduring competition for medical talent is examined in the June issue of Health Leaders magazine.
What’s behind the trend? The article “Help (Still) Wanted” offers one large explanation – the re-emergence of the employed physician model. For many younger physicians, hospital employment is preferred over private practice or work in a small physician group. Hospital employment can mean regular office hours, and greater consistency in fee-payment schedules.
Hospitals also get the nod, the article notes, because of prevailing occupational circumstances. Paperwork associated with the multi-insurer system sometimes can mean private practice physicians spend an inordinate amount of time in non-patient related activities. Also, Washington-led movements toward health payment structures have led more doctors to seek medical staff positions.
For hospitals, then, continuing physician recruitment remains a top priority. Strategic talent hires means growth in critical service lines like orthopedics, along with cardiac and cancer care. Keeping doctors on staff means these bottom-line friendly services are performed “in house.”
Tough times can translate into postponed capital improvements and painful layoffs for non-medical staff. But for hospitals with an eye toward better times ahead, physician hires today means a better positioned tomorrow.
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Posted by Jack Stenger on June 24, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Filed under: Brain Candy for Health
Tags: Health Leaders Media, physician employment
Coinciding with the rise of social media is the reorientation of marketing towards tribes. Unlike push marketing, tribe-based marketing strives to gather people around a particular idea or concept, fostering a sense of community. As Seth Godin points out, this approach is not so much about imposing an idea upon a group as forming connections among people who already have an interest in something. Using the tribe metaphor, Godin focuses on the ability of a single person (or business) to organize that tribe, creating a movement and changing the status quo. In essence, a good tribal leader identifies a point of connection among a group of people and then controls the distribution of that connection.
However, a lot of social media has created the opportunity for groups to coelesce without a figurehead in the form of a single leader. There may be an instigator (such as the person who initially creates a Facebook page), but as a group grows it’s tough for the initial creator to control the direction the tribe takes because when it comes down to it, tribes aren’t former around people, they’re formed around ideas. We can see this when spontaneous networks show up without a figurehead. Recent examples have included “citizen journalist” reporting of disasters such as September 11, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the Mumabi terror attacks, and the spread of swine flu. No single entity organized individuals to start sharing their experiences, but the availability of the technology and the immediate, apparent need for expression caused the emergence of the networks.
What’s even more interesting about these networks is that they arose in spite of a figurehead-driven outlet delivering information on the same topic. News organizations were forced to put away their authoritative, “push” means of working and adopt the grassroots, tribal way of working. On the one hand, this would bolster the idea of the symbiotic relationship of tribe and leader. By encouraging the growth of the tribe reporting on the tsunami, for example, MSNBC was being a good tribal leader by not forcing a product (in this case its own reporting of the news) on its constituency and instead facilitating connections between people in the midst of the chaos and people wanting to gather information on the tragedy. On the other hand, however,this situation shows how little the importance of the leader is as a result of social media.
In this particular case – news media coverage – Twitter, Facebook, and other social media applications provide the actual distribution method for the product (news coverage). The actual news outlets only provide a venue that is, traditionally, the go-to point for news coverage. By repurposing the citizen journalist-created content, the news outlets may appear to be tribal leaders that can direct a movement, changing the status quo of how news is reported, but in actuality they are becoming another conduit in the stream that has no director. In fact, the worst thing that these outlets could do to the stream would be to try to be such a figurehead, damming up the stream of information and the resulting tribal connections.
While in the news world, it would seem that social distribution networks like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. are quickly overtaking the traditional types of news story distribution and making tribal organization difficult, there are other possibilities for being a successful, sustainable tribal organizer. Most of these opportunities involve finding a tribe that cannot create an effective network with the general tools at their disposal. Obama’s presidential campaign is one of the most often-cited examples of this, and with good reason. In past elections, information has been push-based. A candidate would tell his position and feed information outward rather than try to bring people into an idea and engage them. Any sort of tribal organization would be done outside of the official campaign with no central leadership. The Obama campaign, however, provided that figurehead and moved the marginal tribal organization to the main stage. It created a social network that could not have emerged without a figurehead coordinating all of the different parts. The Obama-specific social network could not have been replicated through a Ning network and keeping official updates on the campaign circulating would have been difficult if not impossible without a central Twitter and Facebook account. Now that he’s been elected, change.gov is also an effective venue for organizing feedback and official updates that could not be duplicated through non-directed, general use of other mediums (general discussion boards and mass emails, for example).
What Obama did right and the news organizations did wrong is identifying an area that actually needed a tribal leader. Not every industry and not every product will lend itself to existing as a directed tribe. While it may be inspiring to believe that true change and movements occur by one person coming forward an organizing, social media has begun to change that dynamic. Some industries may be temporarily able to support a figurehead at the top of the tribe, but unless that figurehead is providing a medium of organization that is unavailable elsewhere, the tribal figurehead structure is not sustainable.
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Posted by Todd Woodlan on June 10, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Filed under: Ramblings
Tags: marketing, new media, Seth Godin, social networking
