How to Improve Your Medical Onboarding & Training Process

Updated October 2026

Healthcare organizations continue to face workforce challenges across a range of clinical specialties. The U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) projects shortages in numerous healthcare professions through 2038, making employee retention, training, and workforce development increasingly important priorities for health systems.

Let’s examine the purpose of onboarding and some practical steps you can implement to improve the success of onboarding and training new medical staff.

What Is the Purpose of Medical Onboarding?

Onboarding begins before the employee’s first day, and it can go a long way to making staff feel welcome and supported. The goal is to acclimate staff to their new environment, set goals and expectations for their role, and prepare them to be successful at your organization.

This crucial step in the employee experience helps new team members familiarize themselves with your organization and their team plus understand the systems, processes, and skills that will help them succeed.

This is especially necessary for medical staff who need to be proficient in healthcare-specific processes and requirements such as telehealth, handling electronic health records (EHRs), or managing medical supplies.

RELATED: Preventing Healthcare Burnout

The Importance of Getting Onboarding Right for Medical New Hires

According to a 2023 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, talent acquisition and employee retention remain top concerns for healthcare leaders. Although employment levels have started to even out following the COVID-19 pandemic, the recovery has been slow for some organizations and further challenged by some high turnover rates for new hires.

A 2025 study of 200 newly hired nurses and nursing assistants found that a structured onboarding program significantly improved competency, digital tool usage, clinical protocol knowledge, decision-making, patient safety practices, and satisfaction compared to a standard onboarding approach.

As of 2025, the national hospital turnover rate was 18.5%. Turnover is substantially higher among employees with less than one year of tenure, underscoring the importance of early employee experience and onboarding. Quick turnover is a resource drain for healthcare organizations since the average time to recruit an experienced RN ranges from 61 – 120 days (200+ for senior level), and the average turnover cost for a bedside RN is $52,350.

The ongoing labor demands are forcing hospitals to resort to costly workforce coverage strategies such as premium compensation programs, increased reliance on travel clinicians, and additional overtime.

Alongside investments in talent acquisition and workforce development, it benefits healthcare organizations to prioritize strengthening their onboarding process as well.

Well-developed onboarding programs have been shown to lower attrition and increase retention rates while boosting employee morale and engagement. In fact, a survey by the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) found that onboarding efforts would have impacted employees who quit within six months:

About 30% said they received barely any or no onboarding at all, and 15% said that lack of effective onboarding contributed to their decision to leave.
23% said that receiving clear guidelines on their role and responsibilities would have encouraged them to stay.
21% said they required more effective training for their roles.

Onboarding has the potential to build employee relationships, commitment, and confidence early into their tenure. Without proper onboarding, healthcare organizations may find themselves struggling with employee turnover and the hiring challenges that go with it.

Download our Free Onboarding Checklist for Hiring Managers. Keep track of your onboarding tasks to help make the onboarding process great for your new hire.

What Hiring Managers Can Do to Enhance Their Medical Onboarding Practices

Medical onboarding has the power to build a solid foundation and fulfill employee experience. You can start simply with a plan or build out a more robust program depending on the needs of your organization and capabilities of your team. Let’s review one approach for each.

Create an Onboarding Plan

One way to structure an onboarding plan is around the five Cs—Culture, Connection, Clarification, Compliance, and Check-Ins.

Culture: Communicate the shared vision, values, and behaviors that define your organization so medical staff can gain a sense of belonging. Be sure to share how employees can support and contribute to the culture in your organization.
Connection: Building connections with colleagues, leaders, and even patients can be essential to building a sense of community within a healthcare setting. During onboarding, it’s important to share how new hires can foster connections with their peers, leadership, and other stakeholders. This can include anything from who to go to for day-to-day questions to finding a mentor.
Clarification: Set clear expectations during onboarding so the employee understands their role, responsibilities, and performance expectations. Medical roles vary depending on things like the setting and level of patient care required, so it’s important to clarify the specific job functions and responsibilities that the new hire will be expected to perform within their role.
Compliance: Ensure the new employee has completed all necessary legal and regulatory demands for their role, such as safety or security requirements, and more. This is especially important in healthcare settings where noncompliance can result in regulatory issues. Depending on the individual’s role, you may need to review their compliance around level of access to electronic health records, medications, and interactions with patients.
Check-in: Provide ongoing support to help new employees address concerns or challenges that arise after their initial onboarding. Having regular communication channels or feedback can help new hires feel supported and valued.

How to Create a Medical Onboarding Program

Beyond providing onboarding information, healthcare organizations can invest in creating an onboarding program.

The program can begin with the employee signing their contract and then focusing on critical milestones like the first day, first week, first month, first six months, and the first year.

Onboarding programs take effort to initially create, but they may help organizations standardize the process for better efficiency for leaders and build a better introduction for new hires as well.

A fleshed-out program gives HR, operations, and clinical leaders the opportunity to evaluate every touchpoint in the employee experience. Many healthcare organizations also work with workforce and consulting partners to assess onboarding effectiveness, identify process gaps, and build standardized programs. It also ensures consistency across employee experiences, regardless of medical specialty.

Examples of an onboarding program include:

Before Day One (Pre-Boarding)

Ask your healthcare talent partner to close the job listing and notify any candidates that were interviewed that they were not selected for the role.
Finalize any necessary background checks or drug test results ahead of employment.
Share a welcome email with helpful first-day information such as facility FAQs, copies of the employee handbook, and any role-specific information such as team schedules so the employee has time to review. It might also be helpful to include a glossary of common company acronyms or a list of local restaurants for their lunch breaks.
Ensure specialized medical staff are aware of any expectations that may differ from standard employees.
Work with IT and HR ahead of their first day to get devices or software access set up. This can be anything from computers to scrubs to specialized medical equipment.
Set up employee access to healthcare systems containing sensitive private personal and health information. Since HIPAA law requires role-based security for EHR access, it’s important to ensure employees have the right level of access.

Designate a time and location for the new hire’s orientation, whether in person or virtual.

If your organization is large enough, consider creating and sharing an onboarding portal or dashboard to centralize all new hire information in one cloud-based location. This includes electronically managing forms such as contracts, tax documents, payroll forms, benefits, and other employee forms.

Similarly, consider creating a portal for all required medical training, such as HIPAA, healthcare fraud, or cybersecurity to ensure employees know which training is required for their role and can access them in a singular place.

Day One

Give your new employees a tour of your facility and cater it to their specific role. If they need regular access to a lab or resource in a specific wing, it may be helpful to show them the routes that will get them there efficiently.

Introduce the new hire to their teammates, and make sure they know who to go to for questions and how to access resources or staff.

Ensure they have their access badge or code to any areas that require a security clearance.

Designate a peer mentor or onboarding ambassador to help guide the new employee during their initial days, answer questions, assist with training, and continue introducing them to other colleagues.

After Day One

Set up routine check-ins between you and the employee (and HR as appropriate), such as a 15-30-90 day cadence, so employees have ongoing feedback and see that the company is vested in their success.

Send out onboarding surveys to employees once they’ve been onboard for a while (perhaps 2-3 months) so HR can get feedback on the success of their program and make continuous improvements.

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Beyond Onboarding: The Importance of Training Healthcare New Hires

Setting new hires up for success doesn’t stop at onboarding. Medical technology and patient care are constantly evolving, so it’s important to train and develop your team throughout their tenure.

Training your medical staff can vary based on their area of expertise and level of experience, but it helps ensure that employees are up to date with medical standards and can provide the best possible patient outcomes.

Types of training for medical staff:

Customer and patient-admin training: Interacting with patients and patient families at the front desk, billing center, or on the floor is a crucial touchpoint in a patient’s journey. Routine training on preventing patient intake bottlenecks, sending post-appointment surveys, and monitoring calls with HIPAA-compliant software can help train staff to provide more compassionate care.
Patient-experience training: Similarly, nearly 73.28% of patients report using online feedback to evaluate providers before treatment. Training staff in the hard and soft interpersonal skills needed to navigate patient interactions can pay off in a better overall patient experience.
System training: The rise of telehealth, EHR modernization, AI-powered clinical tools, and virtual health applications means healthcare professionals are interacting with more technology than ever. Ongoing training helps employees effectively use these systems while maintaining compliance, security, and quality of care. It may also offer an opportunity to review cybersecurity challenges in medical fields.
AI training: As healthcare organizations adopt AI for documentation, patient engagement, administrative workflows, and operational decision-making, onboarding programs should include foundational AI literacy training. Employees need to understand how AI tools fit into clinical and non-clinical workflows, what data governance requirements apply, and where human oversight remains essential.
Leadership development training: Leadership training for medical staff and physicians has resulted in more effective team communication, the development of a team culture, and better conflict resolution.
Customized training: A physician and a registered nurse will require different continuing education for their respective specialties, so ensuring that everyone can develop skills that benefit their job function is something to consider.

Onboarding and Training Healthcare Staff Takes Concerted Effort

Onboarding and training medical staff require intention and effort on the part of the healthcare facility, but it ultimately can result in more successful staff and even better patient outcomes.

If you need support building a stronger healthcare workforce, optimizing onboarding programs, improving training outcomes, or navigating workforce transformation initiatives, Insight Global can help. Through talent solutions, consulting services, and workforce strategy expertise, we help healthcare organizations build teams that are prepared to deliver exceptional patient care.

Insight Global is a talent, consulting, and AI company that delivers business outcomes in an ever-changing world. With access to top talent in more than 50 countries, our tech-enabled recruiters can build teams quickly. Our technical experts across Cloud, AI, Data, Enterprise Operations, and Applied Engineering deliver solutions tailored to each customer’s needs.