The recruitment strategy at Lee Health in Fort Myers, Florida, is about much more than simply filling openings. It is about creating a full circle of engagement among 18,000 employees, which includes about 1,350 physicians and other health professionals, throughout five hospitals.
From thoughtfully crafting each ad through engaging candidates, curating positions and opportunities, to making a final offer, Nariman Heshmati, MD, an ob-gyn and chief clinical officer for Lee Health, and his team have successfully spearheaded a program that does more than hire people. It creates genuine bonds with new hires and establishes the organization’s commitment to building and maintaining relationships.
The Lee Health team, with the help of Dr. Heshmati, has combined recruitment and retention into a single organizational dynamic. It’s built on his conviction that systems recruit better candidates by personalizing the hiring process, clarifying all parties’ expectations up front and respecting physicians’ stated values, wants and needs. Better yet, the new physicians and other health professionals stay longer, saving Lee Health the stress, time and expense of refilling existing positions and investing in new ones instead.
Lee Health is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
Rewrite the job ad
“Retention actually starts with the recruiting process,” Dr. Heshmati explained during the 2026 AMA Insight Network Summit in Chicago. In alignment with that, Lee Health has moved away from rigid site-specific expectations.
“A lot of ads look very generic, but we're all competing in the same marketplace, so we have to differentiate ourselves,” he said. “I encourage everyone to take a look at the ads. Even ask a doc in the department to take a look at it.”
That approach was driven by need. The physician group has almost doubled in size over five years, with up to 265 new hires starting every fiscal year. That rate of growth raises the stakes, all but forcing the system to be more intentional about recruitment and retention.
For example, as recently as two years ago, new physicians would receive a rigidly formatted site letter. However, retention problems often began because recruitment language did not clarify how the job may evolve.
“The letter would say, ‘You’re going to be at this site, and this is where you're going to practice,’” Dr. Heshmati recalled. “But that building may not be there in a couple of years, or patient needs or expectations may be different.”
A candidate who explicitly stated a preference for a certain location or region would eventually experience the downside of a sudden mismatch.
“When the time comes for a shift, or we need coverage somewhere else, we're going to lose someone,” he said. “So, we've shifted away from that. We want that flexibility and so now we set those expectations up very early on.”
Gastroenterology recruitment is a case in point. Rather than simply advertising competitive compensation and benefits, Lee Health designs positions around the practice models that gastroenterologists increasingly say they prefer.
“I told my recruiting team that we have competitive pay, we do X, Y and Z, but we don't say how we were different from anyone else,” said Dr. Heshmati. “So, we listen to what they say they want and that's what we offer them and that's how we were able to recruit around 10 GI docs within the last year and a half.”
Elevate the visit and the process
Another point of differentiation is a concierge-style service for high-priority recruits.
“When we would bring people in to interview, they'd be stressed out, in a rental car rushing from site to site. Sometimes we'd book too many interviews and sometimes they'd run late,” Dr. Heshmati recalled.
The solution was a car and driver provided by Lee Health. Nothing fancy. A mid-model Toyota branded with Lee Health’s logo, but it does the trick. Candidates are spared the stress of navigating a day packed with interviews in a strange city. Instead, they are picked up at their hotel, chauffeured through the day and introduced to the teams and the community.
It's also proven to be a valuable source of informal feedback. The staff member or driver engages with the candidate, observes behaviors and interactions outside of the interviews, and shares insights that would otherwise have been missed.
The convenience and congeniality “have been a huge hit with our candidates,” enthused Dr. Heshmati, noting further that recruitment is ongoing and does not stop with candidates accepting offers.
“I told the team, ‘I want a record of every single clinician who touched this process, but we did not hire,’” he said. “If anyone falls out of that cycle at any point, I want it to come to me and the service line centers.”
Every month he receives a list of every physician or care team member who interviewed but was not hired, allowing Lee Health to identify delays, breakdowns that unintentionally derailed potentially strong candidates who may have slipped through the cracks. Recruitment metrics are then reviewed as part of the organization’s monthly operating reports, creating accountability at each point in the candidate journey.
The purpose is not just data gathering.
“We’ve found misses, and we went back, and we hired people that turned out to be excellent clinicians,” Dr. Heshmati said. “When we do our monthly operating reports, recruiting delivers those metrics, so we’re watching it continuously the entire time.”
Onboard and support
Retention at Lee Health extends well beyond compensation. Dr. Heshmati described a strategy the Lee Health team built around helping physicians and care teams succeed, feel supported and connected within the larger organization.
"We're getting more and more people with less experience, so a very structured onboarding process is critical to making sure they're successful,” he said.
That includes fellowship opportunities and leadership development for nonphysician providers, a transparent commitment to maintaining compensation at or above market, paid memberships in the Lee County Medical Society and the AMA, community-building dinners, monthly virtual office hours with leadership and regular organizational surveys help identify and address pain points before they become the reasons that drive clinicians to move on.
"People often leave because there's something that's frustrating them, but that message just never makes it to leadership. So, you lose some that you didn't need to,” Dr. Heshmati added. “Investing in your people and your leaders lets them know that you care about them."
Towards that end, he added, “Every single one of them has my personal cell phone number. In fact, every single one of them has most of our cell phone numbers, including our CEO’s."
Recruiting never ends
Instead of treating recruitment and retention as separate functions, every stage of Lee Health's process, from wording the ad to integrating new hires, is designed to reinforce the next. Recruitment becomes onboarding. Onboarding becomes professional development. Professional development becomes engagement and engagement becomes long-term employment.
That strategy has produced measurable results. Over the past year, physician voluntary turnover declined from 5.9% to 4.8%, while nonphysician provider turnover dropped from 13.7% to 7.6%, a reduction of more than six percentage points.
Dr. Heshmati and his team have been successful in creating a process and philosophy that builds trust from the outset through honesty, flexibility and a clear understanding of what physicians and care teams value most. Recruitment is not simply about convincing someone to accept a position. It is only the first step in building long-term, personally and professionally satisfying relationships.
Find out more about paving the way for new physician success and satisfaction with the AMA STEPS Forward® toolkit “Onboarding Optimization.”
