Physician employment is moving at a slower pace than expected at Indiana University Health Physicians, a joint venture of IU Health and the university’s medical school, according to an Indianapolis Business Journal report.
The physician practice employed roughly 850 physicians at the end of 2011, three years after its founding, but it had planned to employ at least 1,200 by this time. Despite that shortage, IU still employs more physicians than any other hospital system in the Indianapolis area.
IU Health Physicians CEO John Fitzgerald, MD, has said the employment process is moving more slowly than expected because the practice wants to focus on “truly integrating the physicians as they come in,” which takes more time and can detract from recruitment. These integration efforts include training physicians in the IU electronic medical record and conducting meetings in which physicians design common protocols for treating patients.
“We didn’t want to bring people in for the sake of having them in a single group,” Dr. Fitzgerald said in the report. “We want to make sure that the doctors that we recruit are a good fit. That they buy in to the culture that we develop.”
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