As Hospitalists Cement their Worth, Compensation Continues Upward Climb
Tom Smith, MD, vice president of clinical quality and hospitalist medical director at North Fulton Regional Medical Center in Alpharetta, Ga., is emotionally torn every time practice-based compensation and productivity data are published— data he will both use and defend against in negotiations with staffers and would-be staffers.
If nocturnist salaries are increasing nationally, will he have to pay his night-shift staff more?
If work relative-value units (wRVUs) are rising in his region, will he need to review how hard he is working his staff—or not hard enough?
If group leaders are receiving compensation premiums, should his top docs be paid above rank-and-file colleagues?
“There are upsides and downsides,” Dr. Smith says. “No. 1, if your compensation is good or appropriate, they sort of validate your pay and, I guess, your self-worth to some degree. But I think if you’re on the lower side, it definitely starts bringing to mind the ‘grass-is-greener scenarios.’”
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Medical Group Management Association DataSource: MGMA Physician Compensation and Production Survey: 2012 Report Based on 2011 Data
For hospitalists, the grass is green in most cases. Median compensation for adult hospitalists rose 6% to $233,855 in 2011, while productivity remained nearly static, according to the Medical Group Management Association’s (MGMA) Physician Compensation and Production Survey: 2012 Report Based on 2011 Data. The report is based on data compiled from 3,402 hospitalists nationwide; slightly more than 56% of respondents work in practices owned by hospitals/integrated delivery systems (IDS); 26% work in physician-owned groups.
The data, which excludes academic hospitalists, shows hospitalist pay has jumped more than 27% since 2008, when unadjusted figures pegged median hospitalist compensation at $183,900 nationwide. The climb comes despite little movement in the number of wRVUs hospitalists are producing. In 2011, the median physician wRVU rate was 4,159 per year, a 0.17% drop from the year prior.
The MGMA survey data will be incorporated into SHM’s annual State of Hospital Medicine report (SOHM), which features information on individual physicians and HM groups. The SOHM report received submission from 396 groups that serve adults only (for more about the survey instruments, see “Apples to Apples?”). Some 40% were employed by hospitals/IDS; a third were employed by management companies; and the rest were academic or other models. The report includes group-level data valuable to hospitalist groups, including financial data (i.e. hospital support payments and CPT code distribution), and information on staffing and scheduling.
Combined, the MGMA and SHM reports show a specialty where compensation continues to be pushed by demand outstripping supply, particularly in southern states (see Table 1). More subtly, leading hospitalists say, the data shows that much of the work that physicians now do—QI initiatives, committee leadership and leading digitalization efforts—is not completely captured by the wRVU metric, long the gold standard for measuring productivity.
“I really believe this is critical, critical information for people to have,” says William “Tex” Landis, MD, FHM, chairman of SHM’s Practice Analysis Committee. “Administrators need to have information to make sure that they’re being appropriate in the compensation that they’re paying the physicians. So everybody that’s involved in hospitalist programs is interested, or should be interested in this data, because it allows them to right resource their programs.”
Dollars and Sense
First and foremost in the MGMA data is the continued trend of rising compensation. In a seemingly endless uptick, hospitalists in the South continue to earn the most (median compensation $258,793, up from $247,000 in 2011 data). Southern hospitalists, though, only saw a 4.8% increase in compensation. The largest percentage jump (7.4%) was for hospitalists in the East (median compensation $227,656, up from $212,000 the year prior). Doctors in the East typically have the lowest compensation of the country’s four geographic regions, but this year’s data showed hospitalists in the West with the lowest figure (median compensation $223,574, up from $213,405).
