As Hospitalists Cement their Worth, Compensation Continues Upward Climb
The value of data points on emerging and existing trends is that it gives HM groups and group administrators thresholds to benchmark themselves against, Dr. Simone says.
“It also allows the HM leader to compare within a practice,” he adds. “If hospital medicine groups are performing at or above median, or are highly functional groups, it gives great feedback that they’re doing things correctly. But it also gives the leader an opportunity to make a sound business plan when he’s going to talk to the hospital [administration] for subsidy, or when he’s going to negotiate compensation for his providers for the next year. I think that’s a powerful tool.”
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Richard Quinn is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.
How Long Can The Stool of Staffing Success Stand?
William “Tex” Landis, MD, FHM, medical director of Wellspan Hospitalists in York, Pa., and chair of SHM’s Practice Analysis Committee, likes to say that hospitalists are a fundamentally necessary service in hospitals. But keeping a full complement of hospitalists is hard work—and money is a big draw.
“We have to make some way for it to be a more desirable position, and my feeling is that there are three legs that stool stands on, and that’s salary, schedule, and scope,” he says. “Those are the three things that you have to play with and if the scope of the service is going to stay the same and the schedule is going to be similar, then the third thing that’s easiest to adjust is the salary.”
Dr. Landis has no answer to when he expects compensation to stop increasing. But Leslie Flores, MHA, SHM senior advisor for practice management and a principal in the practice management firm Nelson Flores Hospital Medicine Consultants, believes it’s dangerous to climb too high in compensation without something else changing dramatically.
“At some point,” she says, “there is a breaking point in terms of what hospitals can afford to spend to support hospitalist programs, and that is going to either cause significant salary pressure, or it’s going to cause significant pressure for hospitalists to increase their productivity and become a lot more efficient in their clinical work, or both.”
—Richard Quinn
