Doctors don't offer help and healing to patients all on their own. A medical practice is a team. That's why choosing the best medical and administrative staffers is so critical. Here are 13 tips to help you find and retain the right people.

Lee Wan, MD, an ophthalmologist at Oxnard-based Coastal Eye Specialists Medical Group, knows a thing or two about hiring good people. The median tenure of the staffers in his employ is--and this may seem like a misprint to many doctors--a whopping 10 years. What makes someone stick by you for a decade or more? And how do you spot the person with the commitment, compassion and drive to do so? Well, to have good people on staff, Dr. Wan says, you simply need to hire good people.

That, he and other physicians emphasize, not only hasn't changed as healthcare continues to transform, it's actually truer than ever. Computer skills have been required for decades, for example, but now office staffers must be able to use sophisticated practice management systems integrated with clinical decision-making support programs and electronic medical records. How do you spot the job applicant who can handle the types of cutting-edge technology in your office? You're probably better off looking for a good overall employee who you can teach the technology details to on the job.

"Computer literacy now goes beyond simply knowing how to use word processing and the mouse," Dr. Wan explains. "It includes not only e-mail, but also text messaging, multimedia presentation and organization, search engine use, and safe and efficient Internet browsing. Indeed, every new piece of equipment is computer-based, so staffers need to be comfortable learning various types of programs and recognizing the common software interfaces that they use." Specifically, he adds, "security and privacy issues are also more important, so employees must be constantly vigilant for virus attacks, spam and security breaches. Being able to troubleshoot simple hardware and software problems without having to call tech support for every little glitch helps, too."

However, the increasing sophistication of medical office technology notwithstanding, "the basics, still, are someone who is kind, eager to please, happy, sociable, energetic, compassionate, thoughtful, smart and interested in medical practice," Dr. Wan says. "You can't teach someone to be compassionate, motivated or a good team player. But if someone is, it becomes much easier for that person to learn about insurance and office operations and to develop clinical knowledge and skills."

Finding that someone is the key, of course, and it requires careful attention to the questions you ask, the job you describe and the benefits you offer. Here are 13 tips from experts who've suffered the proverbial trials and tribulations of finding excellent office staff.

1 Make sure new hires know the importance of customer service. "First and foremost," says Nabil Razzouk, PhD, CEO at Arrowhead Orthopaedics in Redlands, "physician offices need to hire staffers who are committed to the 'gold standard' of customer service." There are minimum skills that every hired individual should have, he adds, such as knowledge of medical terminology, proper telephone skills, well-developed communication skills and basic computer skills. But Razzouk says the most essential skills are knowing one's customers and showing empathy and caring.

2 Make sure new hires can embrace changes in the way health benefits are designed and administered. As consumer-directed plans grow, for example, front-office employees may need to be able to explain the subtleties of, say, procedure pricing and plan reimbursement to patients. "A person in the insurance department should have the responsibility for explaining some of the differences to patients and serve as the patient insurance advocate, but also a lot of that responsibility belongs to the benefits departments of patients' employers," says Judy Capko, of Capko and Co., a medical practice management and market research company based in Thousand Oaks. "The biggest responsibility for the practice is having Internet-savvy employees who can go online to check benefits and eligibility."

3 Customize your approach to ensuring an understanding of patient benefits in your practice. Everyone in Dr. Wan's office is familiar with various benefits structures because that familiarity is "absolutely essential in an ophthalmology practice where we have a mix of medical insurance, vision plans and self-pay patients," he explains.

The general rule is front-office staff tries to make the initial coverage determination, but Dr. Wan ensures that every person who comes in contact with a patient during a visit or afterward understands. "Everyone-front, back and in between-needs to be able to discuss coverage, treatment options and cost information with the patient, and to be able to present that information in a medically appropriate, medico-legally safe, regulatory-compliant and customer-friendly way." That should be made clear to applicants early in the hiring process, he says.