Wichita Clinic Improves Patient Care by Shifting their Focus in Selection

Based in south-central Kansas, the Wichita Clinic is the state's largest physician-owned multi-specialty practice, providing quality patient care since 1948. With 12 locations and 160 doctors in 40 specialties, they manage more than a half a million patient visits a year.

Turnover was a major concern. Tracking at over 40%, the cost to the organization was in excess of $1 million annually. The goal was to understand why they were having such a high turnover and re-align their hiring and the people management system to support higher rates of retention.

The highest turnover was with the support staff, so that's where the ProfileXT was introduced into the hiring process. After two years the overall turnover dropped 15% (generating more than $150,000 in savings). With the success in this area, they expanded the program to all RN and Medical Assistant hires, but it was decided not to profile the doctors. The logic was that the doctors are the doctors, and they are not likely to change their ways; it would be more practical to select a support staff around them that can work with 160 bosses. Turnover dropped again and now is stable at a healthy 20% annually generating a yearly savings in excess of $500,000 along with a significant decrease in patient complaints.

Other benefits were found to come from having the ProfileXT data at their finger tips in their own administrative portal. With information from the ProfileXT they were able to be more effective in their communications during contract negotiations, saving months of meetings.

Sharing information is critical to their success. At the clinic, everyone see their own full reports and meets with their teams and share results together. They now use the ProfileXT for every employee for every position prior to the interview.

Next Step: Revisiting the benchmarks that they are using within their organization for all positions.