Doctors Tread Carefully When Grateful Patients Open Checkbooks

As government funding for research continues to shrink, medical institutions are relying more on donations from individuals and foundations. As a result, doctors at such organizations are now expected to think about fundraising much more than in previous eras.

That expectation can cause discomfort and angst about the ethics of raising money from grateful patients. Unless doctors have the proper training, even the most principled interaction with donors can sour them on the idea of ever trying to raise money again.

Some medical institutions rely on consultants to train physicians on the finer points of donor cultivation, but a lot of that training is either ineffective or unattractive to doctors already pressed for time.

Steve Rum, who heads the development office at Johns Hopkins Medicine and has 25 years of experience as a fundraising professional, was frustrated that none of the training programs he had seen seemed to work very well.

Unsure of how to proceed, he had his office conduct a study in 2010 of about 50 Johns Hopkins physicians to measure the effectiveness of three approaches to educating doctors about fundraising.

The doctors were randomly assigned to three groups. One group received weekly emails that included articles about donations to various organizations, general information about philanthropy, and articles about philanthropy in medicine.

The second group participated in one-hour training sessions taught by doctors who had collectively raised more than $100-million for their departments.

Coaching Wins

The third group received one-on-one coaching from Mr. Rum and two other seasoned fundraisers in his office.

The study found that one-on-one coaching was by far the most effective approach. Those who received direct coaching from Mr. Rum’s office generated a total of 41 referrals of donors who could give at least $25,000 and landed five gifts totaling $219,550. And nearly 90 percent in that group generated at least one qualified referral apiece, compared with a total of three referrals in the group that had attended the lecture. The email group generated no referrals.

“Nobody is going to go from raising 0 to millions after one training session, so we felt the theory of personal coaching was the way to go,” says Mr. Rum.

Dr. Edward Miller, who retired in 2012 after leading Johns Hopkins Medicine for 16 years, says raising money from patients is something physicians should approach carefully, and long after a patient has recovered from an illness.

Even when grateful patients started conversations about giving while still in their hospital beds, Dr. Miller told them to slow down.

“My response was always the same,” he says. “We don’t talk about that now.”