Dear Friend,

The recruitment crisis.

That was the subject of Monday's blog post, Medical Group Growth Without Recruiting. You can follow the link to read the post online, or just keep reading.

It’s not news to you that there’s a huge shortage of physicians in many medical specialties, such as in anesthesiology and radiology. With the overall aging of the physician population, shortages in other medical specialties, including those that are office-based, will intensify.

As a result, many medical groups have difficulty recruiting.

But there’s a secondary impact at play. As a result of the recruiting conundrum, many medical group leaders think that it’s difficult or impossible to grow their group. They believe that they must be able to recruit to grow.

But that’s a symptom of calcified thinking, because there are other ways to achieve growth.

It can be achieved by way of strategic M&A, a process extremely different from the PE approach. It could also be achieved in a way that does not involve any acquisition or merger at all – yes, growth without either de novo business operations or the purchase of or merger with another group.

Of course, this begs the questions of whether a growth model is appropriate for your group, to what extent it might be, of understanding the various reasons for growth including as a hedging strategy, and of what specifically constitutes growth.

Those are the real questions we guide physician leaders like you in pondering, because the questions have to be asked well before moving forward to develop and implement the strategy.

If the recruitment/growth conundrum is a challenge for you, it might make sense to chat.