Under the traditional model that hospitals use to fill physician positions, they pay recruiters a hefty fee to send mass messages. These recruitment services are not only expensive for hospitals, but also use a spray and pray approach that is ineffective in finding the right candidate. flipMD CEO Lauren Hanson said in an interview.
Hanson co-founded flipMD with her husband Gregory in 2020 as an online platform for doctors to find side gigs in consulting. GoodRx acquired the company in February and flipMD now operates as one of its subsidiaries. On Wednesday launched flipMD Hire, a recruiting platform designed to help healthcare providers, drug manufacturers and digital health companies find qualified physicians to fill a variety of roles – whether clinical, non-clinical, full-time or part-time.
Before founding their company, the Hansons were intimately involved in the way the career journey of the medical community unfolded, as Gregory is a physician. They created flipMD to fill a market gap they couldn’t ignore—they knew many doctors were looking for ways to make money outside of clinical practice by taking on project-based consulting work at digital health and pharmaceutical companies.
Doctors who use flipMD’s job search platform for consulting work say they now have an easier way to access additional income streams, according to Hanson. With the announcement the company made this week, doctors now have a job-hunting platform that they can not only use to find a side gig, but to find full-time positions as well. Full-time positions posted on flipMD’s platform include both clinical roles in hospitals as well as non-clinical roles and digital health and biotech firms.
When traditional recruiters send mass messages to physicians to fill positions, it “takes away a lot of ownership from physicians in the process and makes it harder for them to negotiate salaries,” Hanson pointed out. She also pointed out that a huge proportion of messages sent by recruiters end up in the inboxes of doctors who are not currently interested in taking on new roles.
FlipMD aims to address these issues with its new hiring platform by creating an online space entirely dedicated to physician career transformation. Hanson said doctors should think of the platform as a place they can rely on to help them change the trajectory of their careers, no matter what their specific goals are. Examples of these goals include moving to a new clinical role in a different geographic region, leaving a clinical practice for a chief medical officer role at a digital health startup, or taking on a consulting role at a biotech company to help pay off student loans.
“Because understaffing and physician burnout are such big issues, we’re offering a range of choices so people have access to crafting their own hybrid physician careers for the future,” Hanson said.
Doctors on the flipMD platform can also get paid to refer qualified candidates for positions. Henson said this feature greatly improves customers’ ability to quickly find the right candidate because “each doctor probably knows about 200 other doctors” who are more closely matched to the requirements of a job posting they may come across.
“We encourage the community to recommend candidates who are more qualified and more interested,” she said. “We do this in the hope of going straight to the needle in the haystack. I think the referral program is the secret sauce of the platform in many ways.”
FlipMD makes its money by charging its customers performance fees. Customers create a free account, post a job to be filled, and wait for flipMD doctors to apply for the role. They only pay flipMD if their position is filled on its platform.
However, these flat fees vary by customer. For example, a startup looking for a chief medical officer pays about $7,000, while a large hospital pays about $25,000. These fees are cheaper than those paid to traditional employers, which are typically 30-40% of the incoming hire’s salary, he said. Hanson.
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