🎉 Recruiting physicians is a mess
Not to mention incredibly wasteful
In roughly two weeks time, emergency physicians will hold their annual scientific assembly, ACEP19, which is being held this year in Denver. For emergency medicine groups like Envision, TeamHealth, Schumacher, Vituity, and US Acute Care Solutions**, ACEP is by far the largest recruiting event of the year.
Each year, these companies buy and setup large booths on the convention center floor. They send countless recruiters and executives to talk to any potential doctor who may be considering a move, or who is about to graduate residency. They host egregiously lavish parties, renting out enormous event spaces with open bars and DJs, each group attempting to out-do the next to prove their culture is the best culture.
Here is a Tweet from last year’s ACEP18 kick-off party, for which one of the largest emergency medicine groups in the country, Schumacher Clinical Partners, closed down the entire Gaslamp district of downtown San Diego (I was actually at this party):
And here’s ACEP18’s closing night party, for which the largest emergency group in the country, Envision, rented out Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres (This tweet is from a healthcare attorney who has expended much energy on Twitter the past two months trying to protect emergency physician reimbursement rates from a proposed bill in Congress to crack down on surprise billing):
In fact, groups like Envision are spending so much on lobbying Congress, they are starting to prompt tweets from emergency physicians like this one:
To be clear, there are lavish parties in every specialty - not just emergency medicine - and ACEP isn’t the only annual physicians convention, ostensibly held for educational purposes, where members pay millions in advertising and sponsorships in pursuit of recruiting new physicians.