In his first emergency medicine attending position, Leon Adelman, MD ‘08, developed an interest in managing systems of care delivery, in addition to caring for individual patients.
“I really enjoyed designing processes to make sure that all patients coming through the emergency department received high-quality care,” said Adelman.
As he gained perspective on emergency department systems, Adelman learned firsthand about the physician side of medical practices. After residency, he worked for three different emergency medicine practices in ten years, discovering a lot about the resources that were available – or that didn’t yet exist – for physician recruitment.
“It was obvious that there was a missing piece,” said Adelman. There was no technology to learn about potential employers in the emergency medicine specialty, along with basic facts about positions, location, salary, contact information, or working conditions.
Ivy Clinicians Fills The Gap
Adelman’s recently launched company, Ivy Clinicians, aims to change how physicians, PAs, and nurse practitioners find meaningful employment opportunities and how medical practices attract their services.
The platform powering Ivy Clinicians provides a comprehensive listing of available hospital-based jobs by specialty. The service launched in January of 2023 with emergency medicine as the first specialty. Other specialties such as hospital medicine, critical care, anaesthesia and radiology will be added as the company grows.
Only three months after going live, the product is off to a promising start, with hundreds of registered users conducting thousands of unique searches for positions across 5600 emergency departments. Searches show geographic location along with other data such as quality metrics for hospitals, and practice ownership, and will soon add salary information.
The new company is still building and learning, but their goal is to create a better labor market for physicians, said Adelman. In addition, medical practices looking to hire clinicians need a better way to connect with qualified applicants. Ivy Clinicians will help both applicants and employers leverage information and employment opportunities.
Built for Today’s Medical Landscape
The pandemic exacerbated clinician burnout across a healthcare landscape that was already seeing major shifts due to hospital closures and consolidation. The last decade has also seen a dramatic loss of positions available in physician-run practices.
Adelman provided context for the changes that led him to envision this new marketplace. “Traditionally, the physician labor force was not a competitive, mobile labor force. You joined a group and you held on – and you’d be kind of crazy to start switching practices.” Now, with market forces changing how practices are managed, Adelman sees physicians as similar to other professions that need timely, relevant data for better decision making about career options.
Adelman’s experience as medical director for a large rural healthcare system showed him the challenges involved in finding physicians to practice in rural areas. Having a physician marketplace with national reach can help rural healthcare systems recruit and fill positions.
“It’s going to be really interesting to see how practices choose to compete for physicians in the context of more transparency and choice. I anticipate that rural sites will have to pay higher rates, but there’s likely another piece to the puzzle, which is how they sell the quality of the practice,” said Adelman.
The last few years has been especially challenging for emergency physicians, he said. “My goal is to use innovation – and the creative energy that UNC taught me – and channel that to help physicians structure their practice in better, more fulfilling ways.”
Giving Back
Adelman helped to lead fundraising efforts for the named space sponsored by the Class of ’08 in the new Roper Hall medical education building at UNC School of Medicine. He also funded a scholarship in honor of his father, Richard D. Adelman, MD, a family medicine physician who trains UNC medical students in his Raleigh clinic during the pre-clinical phase of their learning.
“My father was really an inspiration to my going into medicine,” said Adelman. “And, as part of the bigger picture, I feel like I owe UNC a lot, so I’m happy to pay that forward.”