How Top Children’s Hospitals are Built
Leveraging and Sustaining the CHOC Asset Requires a Complex Mix of Ingredients
How do we complete CHOC and make the leap to sustainable status as a world-class institution? There are eight basic ingredients that must be in place in order to attract the key ingredient: elite subspecialty doctors.
We are in a talent-driven business. The addition of one doctor with unique passions for research, teaching, and clinical work can bring an entire realm of new competencies to our hospital and community. Currently, however, there is a critical national shortage of doctors who have dedicated their lives to advancing the practice of pediatrics.
For perspective, only four pediatric neurosurgeons are board certified each year in the United States. The competition to recruit these doctors is
fierce. Demand drives up compensation, a cost spiral steepened further by local conditions—the cost of living in Orange County and the reality that California is among the lowest ranking states in the U.S. in its Medi-Cal insurance reimbursements. As a result, CHOC Children’s is fighting an uphill battle to compete for candidates offered higher value packages in markets where cost of living is lower and state insurance reimbursements are significantly higher.
But competitive compensation is only one ingredient in the mix necessary to attract rare talent. In order to simply get onto a candidate’s short list, hospital infrastructure, research environment, and workforce support systems must be on par with the most elite children’s hospitals in the country. The bar is high.
