MedStar Health Reviews

Pros

management cares about employees, good communication, team feeling

Cons

Columbia office location is not near major city

Pros

The Hospitals and the hard working staff are the ones that allow MedStar to thrive. The benefits and compensation package are great at all levels.

Cons

Corporate Senior Leaders do not get along and are out to destroy one another to increase their salaries and bonuses. The ones that get ahead are the ones that lead by fear. They create scapegoats and in-fighting which is desructive to any company.

Advice to Senior Management

The Board should look for a new leadership team. One that can work together and care about the patients and the employees.

Pros

the overall mission and vision of the company is evident even at the staff level - and thats encouraging - thanks

Cons

employees are quickly tracked as staff or management and they will likely live out the duration of their career in that track

Advice to Senior Management

encourage individuals to either perform and improve or move on - allowing the "doers" to rise and be properky rewarded for their efforst

Pros

Decent benefits with 2% annual raises.
Some great support staff (nurses).
Exposure to myriad of rare health issues benefits education.
Davinci robot training.

Cons

Inadequate allotment of education time in contrast to other neighboring programs.
Minimal concern for safety of staff given patient population.
"Monday morning quarterbacking" is counterproductive and denigrates moral.

Advice to Senior Management

Concentrate on enhancing the quality of the residency (rather than revenue and ROI) by providing additional resident resources: more research time earlier (during pgy2), less OB call, metal detectors at the entrance to the hospital before a Hopkins-like event, proactive secuirty measures when patients become verbally obscene, or perhaps even further increasing the number of residents. The program currently teeters on malignancy (50+ clinic patients per hour!?) and it is your responsibility to make improvements.

Pros

The health benefits are excellent and heavily discounted. They own some of the largest hospitals in the area so there is opportunity to move around if you are hospital-based.

Cons

This place looks really good on paper--9 hospitals, diversified businesses, and knows how to stay in the black. However, peel back the covers and you will find that the primary concern of all senior management is getting their bonus. For a non-profit, I have never heard so much focus on revenue by senior management! We all are aware that cash is needed in order to fund the mission, but somewhere along the line money became the unwritten mission here. There are bi-annual surveys of employees, but what the employees say and the resulting "solutions" do not correlate. If senior management is criticized, they brush it off as employees not understanding them or their jobs.

I could deal with the problems if it didn't seem as if there are constant contradictory messages, and practices, depending on who you are. For example, we are given measly raises (the last one was 1.25%) and told to be happy because we have a job. However, published reports state that the CEO makes $3 million per year just in SALARY. This does not include other perks and benefits that exceed $1 million. Also, doctors are kings here so they are used to having temper tantrums if anyone tells them they are wrong (especially if they are high revenue generators).

Also, the party line from senior management is that there is no money for needed additional personnel or software. However, there is money for consultants and outsourcing of essential jobs. Stay away unless you really like to be under-resourced then scape-goated if everything falls apart.

Advice to Senior Management

I have no advice to management that they haven't already received from the employee surveys. They can start by reading those. Also, stop pretending that all performance problems originate with the employee and instead realize that you have no clue on how to identify managers that can motivate employees to want to do their best.

Pros

Want to make a difference but lots of interhospital competition. A bit old fashioned.

Cons

Benefits ok, but you're lucky if you get even a cost of living salary increase. Very little raises.

Advice to Senior Management

Trim the fat

Pros

Good health benefits and offered day shifts.

Cons

Facility was dirty and staffing was terrible on some days.

Advice to Senior Management

Support staff more and offer more educational opps

Pros

Good Benefits and fair salary for a health system compared to the others in the area. Provide challenging work.

Cons

Poor communciation from Senior Management, Bad decisions made by senior management. Needs to have more consistentcy across the organizations that make up Medstar Health. Feel like they make decisions just to create more work. Feel like we are talked down to some times.

Advice to Senior Management

Recieve further input from staff. Bring the right people into the room to make decisions.

Pros

MedStar Health is a leader in Healthcare in the Washington-Baltimore Region. The company is clinically innovative and working hard to move from "Good to Great." You should be proud to work for MedStar as it is very progressive and will be a surviver and leader in the years to come as healthcare evolves.

Cons

MedStar has grown through acquisition and as such the culture is still evolving. There is tension between the desire to have a single integrated corporate culture and at the same time to maintain autonomy between the operating units.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more assertive in developing an integrated organization.

Pros

Excellent tuition reimbursement and health care benefit packages offered.

Cons

Close-knit community. Show discernment in securing a position. If it doesn't feel right, look elsewhere within the organization.

Advice to Senior Management

Aggressively address employee feedback and satisfaction issues.