Some county societies offer staffing services

Several are developing affiliated firms to help practices fill staff vacancies.

By Mike Norbut, AMNews staff. Dec. 19, 2005.

Some local medical societies are creating for-profit affiliates to address one of their members' more common problems: office staffing.

Several medical societies have added staffing services to their cadre of member services in recent years. Their focus is on any health care employee except physicians. They staff positions from the front-desk receptionist to the specialized registered nurse, and they place employees in temporary and permanent positions.

Not only do the societies say they are filling a niche by catering mainly to physicians, but they also are capitalizing on their name and reputation to jump-start their marketing effort.

"There's no doubt in my mind that having [the medical society] nomenclature is advantageous," said Beckett Shady-King, executive vice president of the Sarasota County Medical Society in Florida, which started its for-profit affiliate, CMS Staffing, last year. "After all, we all know anybody can get a small business loan and start their own staffing firm, and we don't need another hat to wear. But no staffing company can come into town and start off with the reputation and client base we have."

Some county medical societies have offered this service for decades, but others just recently started. The challenge for them is that physicians are actually less likely to call for temporary help than they did years ago.

"With declining physician reimbursement and a cross-trained staff, physicians are not so ready to call and bring in someone for temporary work," said Mike Cates, executive vice president of the Memphis Medical Society, which operates the staffing firm Medical Society Business Bureau. "But there are more physicians in town. You have to work at it just like you're a commercial company."