By Meghan McMahon, MS
Physicians across the country in the same specialty, in the same region, with similar backgrounds should all generate relatively comparable rates of patient revenue, right? And be compensated the same? Well, not really.
When it comes to physician compensation and performance benchmarking, academic faculty physicians have distinct situations. Some physicians spend time teaching in classrooms, while others devote hours to laboratory research. Many keep both schedules while also seeing patients in the clinic.
For more than a decade, MGMA has published the Academic Practice Compensation and Production Survey for Faculty and Management Report to meet the needs of a university practice's dynamic population. We just released the 2009 Report Based on 2008 Data, which includes:
- Complete data on 14,502 faculty physician and nonphysician providers and 1,762 managers from 513 clinical science departments
- Data categorized by specialty, rank, geographic region, and more
- Management compensation by department and individual characteristics
- Key medical department performance indicators
As an administrator, you know compensation varies greatly between academic and private-sector physicians. This report is the gold-standard salary benchmark for physicians in clinical science departments. In addition, it allows you to compare your faculty physicians' collections, relative value unit (RVU) data or encounters to other faculty physicians, taking into account diverse academic obligations.
Department administrators can also find fair and accurate benchmarking assistance with the MGMA Academic Practice Compensation and Production Interactive Report released this month. The interactive CD breaks out national data by more categories and percentiles than the printed report, and includes benchmarking tools (view demos) to show how your faculty providers stack up against their peers.
If you don't have time to enter your practice data into the interactive report, the Academic Compensation and Production Module (view demo) is a great timesaver. Accessed online anytime, the Web-based report populates all your department data from your submitted academic practice survey. This makes customized benchmarking much more efficient, and allows you to analyze your department's performance over subsequent years of survey participation.
If you have never participated in the academic survey, plan to do so Sept. 14 through Nov. 20 this year, to help your academic practice stay ahead of the curve.
Meghan McMahon, MS, is MGMA's lead survey analyst on the MGMA Academic Practice Compensation and Production Survey for Faculty and Management Report.
-------
Next entry
Back to the blog