Suppose a top orthopedic surgeon and leading expert in robotic procedures will soon be joining your medical group. A luminary physician typically merits a compensation plan equally as distinctive. Let’s look at some of the components of an example arrangement:
- Annual base salary paid every 2 weeks
- Sign-on bonus paid within 30 days of start date
- Quality bonus paid at year end, based on achievement of specified clinical metrics
- WRVU productivity bonus paid at year end, with a step increase in the payout rate after 1 year
- Additional on-call coverage pay for call days taken in excess of contractual agreement
- Hourly stipend for teaching and mentoring fellows
- Retention bonus paid within 30 days of completion of year 1
- Second retention bonus paid within 30 days of completion of year 2
That’s a lot of payments to keep track of, not to mention ensuring they’re processed according to the contractually specified time period and that reconciliation calculations are performed accurately.
While this example is fictional, the intricacies of administering provider compensation plans are not. The operational mechanics behind paying healthcare providers are unique and nuanced. Even for standard compensation plans, without the additional available compensation categories, the process can quickly become complex and overwhelming for administrators.
Based on our experiences in past project work, and interviews with clients, we have found that the key to effective and sustainable compensation practices is for an organization to conduct ongoing assessments of its compensation administration infrastructure.
We’ve identified six core compensation domains where health systems and medical groups commonly struggle (see figure 1). Deficiencies in these functions make an organization vulnerable to calculation errors and missed payments.
In this article, we’ll explore these compensation domains and demonstrate how one of our clients, a large multispecialty medical group on the West Coast, improved its provider compensation practices through ongoing assessments of these domains.
Published December 8, 2021
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