Celebrating 30 Years of 3RNET With Our Founder, Fred Moskol
This year, 3RNET celebrates 30 years of serving rural and underserved communities through recruitment of physicians and healthcare professionals, development of community based recruitment and retention activities, and national advocacy. To highlight how far 3RNET has come as an organization, Executive Director Mike Shimmens along with Kristine Morin, Director of Communications and Marketing, and Mark Barclay, Director of Member Services sat down with 3RNET founder Dr. Fred Moskol to learn more about our history and show him how we envision 3RNET evolving in the future.
When Kristine Morin tells people that she works for an organization that’s been a job board on the internet since 1995, she usually has to add the context that most people at the time didn’t know what a job board was.
“You have made great strides since I left,” said Fred Moskol, founder of 3RNET. “It was a real struggle to get onto the web. You know, I was working with very rudimentary technology. I was going to conferences with a laptop, a projector, and I had a dial-in modem. I can’t exactly remember the technology, but it was real slow. I worked up a sweat every time I did it.”
Each year since 2013, 3RNET’s Board of Directors selects an individual to receive the Frederic Moskol Leadership Award. Recipients possess outstanding leadership abilities, support the mission of 3RNET, respond compassionately to the healthcare needs of rural and underserved populations, and do so with a collaborative and compassionate spirit. 2021 Moskol Award recipient Keith Clark always keeps in mind an anecdote that Moskol has shared many times: “A rabbi once told me that ‘the most righteous thing a man can do is to give somebody a job.’” Because of the hard work of Fred Moskol, 3RNET is a resource that has allowed so many working in rural and underserved communities to join with him in that noble work.
Running a job board before most people were even consistently using the internet was a significant challenge, but Moskol believed that technology would come to play a critical role in recruitment and retention. When he began his efforts, most states were restricted from using the internet, even if they had computers at their disposal. By the time he had retired as Executive Director in 2005, 3RNET had grown to include 45 members and the website he created with the guidance of an early staff member remains the primary working tool of 3RNET.
The earliest archived version of the website dates January 29, 1998 and boasts 45 member states, but Moskol remembers it taking a long time to get that number of states on board. “We had 12, is my recollection,” he said. “Those were primarily the non-state offices. When I started the whole thing, I brought in people from North Carolina, Oregon, Nebraska, Minnesota, and I think West Virginia. They came to Madison, and we sat around like a sort of steering committee.”
Though 3RNET has now grown to fifty-four members, its mission remains, as can be found on that first website, to help “health professionals locate practice sites in rural areas throughout the country.”
For Moskol, physician recruitment has always been about community development. A pharmacist by training, Moskol also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran, where he first encountered public health work. After returning to the States, he attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin and became Health Program Director for a community health agency. There he worked with locals to assess the health status and needs of the community.
This tactic carried over into 3RNET, where he tirelessly visited locations himself to identify key individuals that may aid in the recruitment of residents with their knowledge and leadership of the local community. From his visits, Moskol created community profiles - a vital tool in developing the appeal of opportunities for new physicians.
Today, community profiles live on in the education that 3RNET provides employers to aid them in crafting effective job opportunities. Employers are encouraged to develop “unique selling points” and embed them in their listings on the website to give healthcare professionals a clear idea of the community they will be living and working in.
When presented with the current iteration of his community profiles, Moskol said: “This is great. I mean, there are all sorts of opportunities for expanding each one of those characteristics, developing community involvement. I really love it.”
Though retired, Moskol is still full of ideas for where to take 3RNET next. There is always a need for more resources, more involved partners, and more champions for the essential work that 3RNET is doing for rural and underserved communities. Now, just as it was when he was getting the organization off the ground, “buy-in from members is critical.”
Though technology has come a long way since 1995, the organization faces many of the same barriers it did 30 years ago. Despite the odds, 3RNET has become the nation’s most trusted resource for health professionals seeking careers in rural and underserved communities. When asked how today’s organization matches up with what he started out to create, Moskol said, simply, “Oh, it’s gone way beyond what I had imagined.”
With primary care physicians seeing an average of 2,500-3,000 patients per year, each placement made through 3RNET affects the lives of tens of thousands of people. As the conversation neared its end, a recent success story of a dentist was shared. She found a position in White River Junction, Vermont, a town of just under 2,800 people, where she is able to provide free dental care, learn from mentor dentists, and supervise dental students - her dream job. She will celebrate her fourth work anniversary this year, and wanted to share her story because, working for a small nonprofit herself, she “know[s] how important it is to celebrate the wins, wherever you find them.” Thanks to the hard work and dedication of Fred Moskol, placements like this happen in rural and underserved communities all across the country.