Building Healthcare Teams That Boost Patient Trust | EP 5

In this conversation, Tim Bouchard and Danielle Egan, Operations Manager from Healthbridge Management discuss the critical aspects of recruiting, mentoring, and retaining a quality team in healthcare practices. Danielle shares her extensive experience in healthcare and emphasizes the importance of mindset, personal connections, and creating a supportive environment for staff. They explore strategies for motivating entry-level employees, the significance of trust in the workplace, and the rewards of developing future leaders within the organization. The discussion highlights the dual focus on patient care and employee well-being as essential for a successful healthcare practice.

Tim Bouchard (00:00)All right. Welcome to Health Care Marketing Edge, where we share stories and strategies to grow your health care practice. I’m Tim Bouchard from Luminous, a health care marketing agency specializing in helping health care practices acquire patients and grow their practice. Today, we’re talking about recruiting and developing a quality team for health care practices. Our guest is Danielle Egan, Operations Manager at HealthBridge Management, HealthBridge Chiropractic. ⁓ And she is a pro motivating and mentoring staff at Health Care Practices.

A lot of different positions in your past. So I’m stoked that you’re here and we’re willing to come out and talk about this topic. Why don’t you introduce yourself and HealthBridge with a little bit of background and then we’ll get into the topic.

Danielle Egan (00:52)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So I’m Danielle Egan. I have worked in healthcare for over 10 years. I started out as a medical assistant. I then was in a call center, supervisor there, and then practice and now operations management. So I’ve kind of done it all, every level, clinical. ⁓

administrative leadership. So all divisions of healthcare I have been there. Currently I am an operations manager at HealthBridge Management, Inc., which is chiropractic, pain management, and orthopedic practices.

Tim Bouchard (01:30)
Gotcha, it was all coming together.

knew that kind of changed recently, like you were saying.

Danielle Egan (01:34)
Yeah,

yeah, so.

We’re definitely rapidly growing which is great. I came from a much larger healthcare system in Philadelphia and Much larger must well known so that is a lot of where I got much of my experience when it comes to team building I’m know going from a large healthcare system to a smaller one, you know a growing one It doesn’t matter. You know, the bottom line is always the same, know motivating recruiting mentoring staff That’s how you grow your

and that’s how you keep dedicated employees.

Tim Bouchard (02:10)
Yeah, speaking of employees and creating teams, mean, like you said, you’ve been at different sized operations over the last decade or so. ⁓ There’s some marketing podcasts, but we’re also going to talk about some of the operations side of this too. But even to get into the operations side of things, you have to recruit.

these people, how do you, what do you do to set the foundation to be able to recruit in the right types of team members that you’re looking for, which then kind of sets you up for the other part that we’ll talk about in terms of retention and growth.

Danielle Egan (02:45)
think the hardest thing about recruiting is those entry level positions. And that’s really like the foundation of healthcare. You have your call center agents, you have your front desk, you have the people that are face to face with patients every day. I think that is the most difficult because a lot of the times they are just setting foot into a career, into the job market. And they’re looking at…

jobs as just that, jobs and a paycheck. They’re not looking at what could be a potential career in healthcare. I’ve seen many of this occur within our access center, call center for patients to call in, get appointments, call in with symptoms. They’re just answering the phone like robotics and just not having that patient centered care because they’re not directly in front of them.

Tim Bouchard (03:15)
Yeah.

Danielle Egan (03:39)
So when I was in that position, I had the mindset of I want to help patients. I want to be in healthcare long-term. Um, so that along with having the upper management support that I did, that got me to be where I am now. So I put that into how I recruit. Um, you know, I tell my background of starting at a temp agency, getting full-time position, getting a team lead position, getting a double promotion to be where I’m

now. So having those personal experiences.

by mentoring those coming into healthcare, telling them this is where you are now, but this is where you can be, I think is very motivating for those entry-level positions. So I think just kind of making it a personal experience and giving them the potential of, this is where you could be in X amount of years.

Those that are excited about that, those are the ones that you wanna recruit and the ones that you wanna bring in.

Tim Bouchard (04:46)
Yeah. Warming warming them up earlier, too, even before they apply helps to me a lot of times. You know, we’ve found not to call a lot of people out, but if you focus a little bit too much on the technical aspect of health care or equipment or location and not so much on the patient experience or the team experience and having a good careers page on your website, I’m like this is basic stuff where you can kind of set that.

This is how we like this is our approach to patient care. This is our approach to team development. Really just like setting the foundation for that thought process before they even hit the apply button. That even warms them up to that conversation, too. And then they’re even more open to that mentorship that you’re talking about.

Danielle Egan (05:30)
Exactly. Yeah, it’s all about mindset. feel like, especially with marketing, you know, want to be able to put, you know, these are our values. These are the people that we want to have with us on our team. And I think having that team mindset.

relates into patient care as well. If you are a part of the team, if you feel like you have people that you can go to that understand what you’re going through and what you deal with on a daily basis, that makes all the difference of, you know, feeling like you are.

one with the healthcare system and with your office and with your staff, then you can be that for patients. Be that one-on-one caretaker or be that shoulder just to cry on if you’re a nurse or just be that person that’s on the phone saying, I’m sorry of what you’re going through, let me get you to the right person.

Tim Bouchard (06:25)
Yeah, let’s lean into that mentoring aspect that you just brought up to you. Now that you’ve been able to attract someone in, you’ve been able to get their attention and hire them in. How do you make sure they don’t fall into that? You described it as sort of like the robotic, you know, tick stuff off the to do list or just make sure I’m doing my job. But but thinking more so about how this relates to helping the rest of the team and providing a good patient experience and where I go from here, if that all falls in line.

Danielle Egan (06:54)
Yeah, so I’ve seen a lot of managers, supervisors, you know, do check-ins, regular check-ins, but then, you know, they don’t check in in between those scheduled times. Me, I had that with a supervisor. I…

I didn’t like that. I’m a very open person. I have an open door policy with my staff. You can come to talk to me about anything, whether it’s work, personal, know, anything. And I do the same. You know, and I think having that personal feel of, you don’t have to schedule time with me. You just, you know, if you have something going on or if you have questions, you can come to me. And I think just keeping it personable and making sure that your team knows that they can come.

to you, that’s when the conversations start rolling and that’s when you can get a feel of where their mindset is, what their goals are, and you you have that open relationship and that connection where you can dig a little deeper to figure out where they want to go in life and that’s how you’re able to you know mentor them to get where they want to be, whether it’s in healthcare or not, but you know just having that open line of communication is definitely key.

Tim Bouchard (08:09)
Well, thinking like you were talking about the brand and values aspect of it, too. Of course, the brand is going to project that it cares deeply about patients and, you know, having expertise and knowledge in those spaces. But the brand itself should also care about the people doing the health care aspect of this, too, and providing that experience to the patients. So.

Internally making sure that they take care of the team almost just as well as they take care of the patients is it’s a double-sided coin that you can’t forget about

Danielle Egan (08:41)
Absolutely, if your workers feel valued, they are going to want to work for the organization and work for your patients. That I think is, you can’t really teach that. You want to be able to have that value connection. You can teach anyone electronics, but you can’t teach people to have compassion for others, and that’s what you need in healthcare.

Tim Bouchard (08:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and some of your biggest advocates even in the employment space because recruiting isn’t easy these days and the job markets are weird across all sorts of different industries, but having that word of mouth or reputation even helps just subtly in the background as well. You combine all those things and you get better applicants, you get more career-driven people versus job-driven people like you were mentioning at the beginning of this.

Danielle Egan (09:30)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, recruiting is hard. I have a lot of people in my family that do recruiting as a career.

It’s different, obviously, in different sectors, but healthcare recruiting, I think, it’s not just the job. It’s your people recruiting. You’re not recruiting for a job. You’re recruiting their personality. One of the big things that I do is, when recruiting, when you’re having those conversations, keep it personal so then you do get a understanding of their vibe and their personality. Does that fit with your culture? Those types of things you really

Tim Bouchard (09:50)
Mm-hmm.

Danielle Egan (10:11)
you can’t teach.

Tim Bouchard (10:13)
Yeah, let’s talk about that aspect when you’re doing your check ins or your regular conversations with them semiannually, annually, whatever, quarterly. How are you working the motivation for that career growth or that extended learning or getting more deeply ingrained within the practice? What are some things that you’ve done in your past to bring people further into the fold?

Danielle Egan (10:35)
So obviously when you’re doing your check-ins, you wanna highlight their current status, how they’re performing. But you also, you can’t always just go right to the negative. You want to highlight the positives, highlight the growth since your last check-in. And then obviously look at where they can learn and where they can grow, but you don’t always wanna just have one mindset of…

These are the numbers that you have to hit in call volume. These are, you you can’t have X amount of patient complaints or, you you have to hit all these numbers. It’s more of…

Tim Bouchard (11:06)
Mm-hmm.

Danielle Egan (11:15)
how can we get there, what can we do, and managing it as a person and not numbers. Like I think that is where a lot of large healthcare systems fail is where they look at numbers and they don’t look at people. You know, everyone’s human. That’s why I like to be that way with my staff, you know, be open, be personable. Everyone makes mistakes, but you have to highlight where you are growing and where they are

doing well and

know where they want to be in the future. So then you can connect the two and say, all right, well, if you want to be in supervisor level in the next couple of years, then why don’t you shadow me for a couple of days? I can show you what I do. Take notes on how I handle talking to you and your check-ins and just give them notes and opportunities to connect with the right people. Because a lot of it is networking too.

want to grow is networking. You know people, that’s how you get to a higher level. You know, that’s how you grow personally and in career. So being that…

Tim Bouchard (12:16)
Yeah.

Danielle Egan (12:31)
openness and saying like, hey, come with me, let’s do this, I can show you what to do. And I think when you’re mentoring, having that opportunity is the main thing. The main thing is opportunity. You have to give them the option to be able to grow.

Tim Bouchard (12:51)
thinking about how that.

Manifest itself in that word of mouth and that reputation to that even Manifest itself at the top level to you you want to bring in an extra provider as part of your growth Then they would hope that the practice that they’re going to join has a certain reputation and a certain presentation a certain professionalism because they’re going to be brought into it whether it’s just as like a high-level provider or maybe a minor partner a junior partner Is that all kind of factors into everything together? But what you were saying about the the motivational

aspect of it too, is you’re really developing the person rather than like critiquing or fine tuning the performance. Of course, performance is important, but those things can be seen in that patient experience and the feedback you start to get. So now you start to say like, are, what are some of the impacts that you see by helping?

retain talent and develop talent that comes through your system versus injecting people midway up in the process.

Danielle Egan (13:54)
Yeah, mean, we have, so I’ve been in orthopedics for a long time, pain management for a long time.

a lot of those patients are either short term or long term. Those long term patients, they come in and they know your staff. If they notice that people aren’t there, they’re like, where’d so and so go? it kind of, like the long term patients, it kind of like may give a red flag of seeing all of these new pieces all the time. So when you are in long term fields and long term…

Tim Bouchard (14:05)
Mm-hmm.

Danielle Egan (14:27)
like divisions of healthcare, it’s important to have those same faces, which obviously results in retainment. You have to look at different ways that you can retain employees, ⁓ not outside of money. Unfortunately with healthcare how it is today, you can’t always give the large bonuses or large raises that you think that people deserve. ⁓

Tim Bouchard (14:54)
Mm-hmm.

Danielle Egan (14:55)
you have to look at it in different ways. You know, lot of the things that were in my control were…

Non-monetary can’t really give you a day off, but hey take an extra half hour for lunch. I’ll cover you. You know and giving that extra time to kind of decompress or you know leave early one day and you know, I cover everyone. I know everyone’s job that’s under me. So if someone is out or someone is stressed, they need to step away. I am there to fill in for them. Having that

ability to step in for your staff, letting them step away so they don’t get too burnt out. know, burnout in healthcare is a huge problem. So giving that just extra 15 minutes of a step away ⁓ could make a difference.

Tim Bouchard (15:49)
Yeah, that stuff starts to show whether people like it or not if it’s not taken care of and the ability to flex like that, like you’re talking about, goes a long way. I short term, you see those initial visit type of people or initial procedure type of patients, they’re the ones that should be leaving the reviews early on to help boost the public reputation, whether it’s like a health grades thing or even just as simple as like a Google reviews type of thing. ⁓

But what you were saying also about that team retention aspect, what consistent patient experience, high quality patient experience. But, know, from a business standpoint, long term patient value for things like follow ups or therapy or just, you know, keeping them in the system so they can stay healthy and also be a part of the practice’s revenue generation, to be completely honest. That’s valuable to the practice as well. So you want to it costs a lot of money to replace people.

costs a lot of money to recruit people and it costs a good amount of revenue to lose patience because you can’t handle all the other things.

Danielle Egan (16:54)
Yeah, exactly. ⁓

Yeah, and that’s why retainment and training, mentoring is so important. So then you try to avoid those high level costs of recruiting, even though, you know, obviously getting fresh faces, fresh ideas is, is great in healthcare, but you also have to think of it from a patient standpoint. You know, we’re all patients in the healthcare system too. What would we like to see when we go into our regular doctor’s office? I like to see people that I’ve worked with, you know, for a while that know me, know my history.

so then I don’t have to go through a huge list of this is what’s going on with me. You know, they know who you are and I think that adds a lot of value in patient satisfaction.

Tim Bouchard (17:40)
When you think about patient experience, it boils down to trust and comfort and consistency in people and consistency in who they’re dealing with and the place that they’re getting treatment and things like that, all factors into trust and comfort. So ⁓ from your side of things as someone that facilitates these processes and growth paths, how does it, know, what’s the reward for you? How do you feel about what you’re doing?

Danielle Egan (18:06)
I love it. If I can get someone from the mindset of I’m here for a paycheck to seeing them grow, move up the ladder to becoming a team lead, a supervisor, a manager, I find that very rewarding because to me it’s I’ve done my job of

training the next level of managers or supervisors coming up. And I know that I have the correct mindset when it comes to healthcare and when it comes to patient care. So if that person is following in my footsteps, then I know that they are going to have the same mindset and be able to provide the same level of compare and compassion that I do. ⁓ And that is just gonna help the system overall and your own practice.

Tim Bouchard (18:53)
Yeah, so someone’s listening to this right now and they’re probably seeing a lot of the same challenges that you’ve seen in your past and they’re saying like, okay, know, everything is of course very monetarily driven still in this industry, just in general, just in society right now. So what are the things, you know, that you’ve brought up that you wanna make sure people remember on how to…

motivate people to not just want to come in and do the minimum and not because we want to squeeze people for as much as they can do, but there’s a lot of opportunity in the practices that you’ve been a part of and the roles that you can elevate people into. ⁓ What are the things that they can turn to first to help motivate those entry level team members to bring them up through?

Danielle Egan (19:41)
I’m just acknowledging the fact that they’re human, you are human, like I mentioned, you know, making it personable.

making them see their potential, connecting in a certain way. When you have conversations with your staff, if you make it personal, then you can find that level of connection and say, hey, I went through that same thing, and connect with them on a level where you have that comfort. And then once you get that initial veil down, you can…

build a little deeper, you know, and get to where their goals are, where they want to go in life, career-wise or personal, and kind of just dig a little bit deeper. And that’s where builds trust. You have to have trust with your employer. You have to have trust with your manager, I feel like. And that’s the way that you are able to retain and have loyal staff who then give the best patient care.

Tim Bouchard (20:45)
Man, the Val point is a very good point because you can’t really, if you jump too far to the advancement point without that trust and connection aspect, it could still seem a little bit more practice centered than team member centered. And so that’s a, I like that one. That was a, that was a good pull. ⁓ Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you would like to make sure people know based on this conversation that I haven’t drawn out yet?

Danielle Egan (21:14)
I mean, people being engaged is key. Find different ways that match your personality to engage staff. Buying a lunch for your team is…

bigger than some people realize. Just knowing that you care enough to go out of your way to give them something as little as a pizza party. It’s little things like that to make that connection. And you just have to find your own ways that match who you are and match who your staff is to kind of get through that level of comfort to get that connection going.

Tim Bouchard (21:39)
Mm-hmm.

I had a thought too when you were talking about the building trust with the team side of things. I would remind practice owners and practitioners about that too. know, we were talking about early on in the recruitment side, if you aren’t laying the foundation for setting up that you have the brand value and the team or operational values that you not only care about patients, which should obviously be out there in front, but also about your team and building that type of care center within.

the practice, then you’re handicapping yourself when it comes to this stuff. So you’re always going to be behind the eight ball trying to bring up the entry level positions and growing from the bottom up. So I just wanted to point that out to you, because it’s very marketing and brand related. And that’s my that’s my side of the equation. Is there anything else you want to mention or you could also tell people about more where they can find about you and about health bridge management and chiropractic and the whole network that you’re associated with now?

Danielle Egan (22:55)
Yeah, so I mean, we’re in the Philadelphia location. I’m on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out if you want to know more about HealthBridge and growing your practice like we are currently. Feel free to reach out. We started off as chiropractic and physical therapy, and now we’re branching into pain management and orthopedic services. So growth is definitely something that I can connect you with.

Tim Bouchard (23:20)
Cool. Well, this has been a wonderful chat about recruitment and growth on the team side. So thanks for being a part of that.

Danielle Egan (23:27)
Thanks for having me.

Tim Bouchard (23:29)
All right, listeners, if you want to take your practice’s brand and patient recruitment to the next level, you can take advantage of our patient pipeline blueprint offer. You can look it up at luminous.agency.blueprint. It’s a workshop to uncover how you can attract new patients and convert more inquiries and appointments for your practice. If you want to hear or watch more content like this, subscribe to Healthcare Marketing Edge on Spotify, Apple or YouTube. And we’ll have more episodes soon and we’ll see you on the next one. Thanks, Daniel.

Danielle Egan (23:56)
Thank you.