While searching for a medical director, many clinic owners will simply click on a web browser window, type “medical directors for hire,” and then compare monthly prices. The cheaper one looks like a smarter choice. Until things start to change. Here is something that people often overlook. Your chosen director will have to take care of all of your GFE problems as well.
What Broken GFE Workflows Look Like
Talk to any compliance consultant, and they will tell you the same patterns, the same gaps, over and over. These issues undermine the medical directors for hire who step in later. They cannot sign off on what they cannot see. And a director who discovers these issues after signing sometimes refuses to work with you at all. The issues may include:
- Nurses performing exams in states that require a physician.
- Intake forms with no medical history review
- Treatment notes were written before the exam happened.
- Asynchronous reviews were claimed but never documented.
- Charts are missing the name of the person who cleared the patient.
- Protocols that contradict actual clinic practice
Why Directors Care About This
Remember that your director’s license is on the line for every treatment under their oversight. When a state board investigates a complaint, they trace the chain back to the supervising physician. And if your documentation is weak, the director takes the hit first. Any good director knows this, and hence they ask hard questions during their first call and want to see protocols, the Good Faith Exam platform, and sample charts. They make sure to read the fine print before signing. A weak director will skip those questions.
Fix This Before the Search
So start by mapping your current process on paper and write down who does what, when, and how it gets recorded. They compare it against the actual requirements of your state. Read the rules published by the state medical board websites and don’t rely on secondhand summaries.
Then, check your chart notes from the last ninety days, pull some of them. If a few of them lack a documented exam, it means your workflow needs repair before anyone new gets hired. You can fix the gaps, update intake forms, add required fields to your EMR, and train your injectors on what clearance looks like. Make sure you build a protocol that matches what happens during a patient visit. After this, you can start reviewing medical directors for hire.
The Backward Approach People Keep Taking
Many owners stick to doing the opposite. They go for the lowest bidder. They assure the new director that they will “get everything straightened out” very soon. They don’t. One year passes, and an audit takes place. They incur fines. The director resigns. The clinic ends up paying twice as much as they had hoped to save.
Such incidents happen time and again; the veterans know them like the back of their hand. Do not end up being the latest case study for someone else.
MedSpire Health offers assistance to clinics in auditing the GFE process and subsequently finding suitable directors based on their services and the requirements of the state.
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