business
Flat pay linked to less expensive care
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted Jan. 10, 2011
Paying physicians a flat salary, as opposed to linking compensation to productivity, has been suggested as one of the possible reasons why the care provided by large multispecialty clinics tends to be less expensive than that provided by smaller practices.
Most large multispecialty clinics, however, pay physicians much like those working at smaller practices, according to a survey published Dec. 20, 2010, in the blog associated with Health Affairs (link). The entry was written by John Kastor, MD, professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, and Mark A. Kelley, MD, executive vice president for Henry Ford Health System and chief executive officer of the Henry Ford Medical Group in Detroit.
The authors surveyed 12 multispecialty group practices. Ten paid physicians at least partly on the number and type of clinical services provided as measured by relative value units. Only two -- Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, based in Oakland, and the Mayo Clinic, based in Rochester, Minn. -- offered fixed salaries with no consideration for volume of clinical services.
"Though these large groups may provide higher quality at lower cost, as some studies assert, their compensation programs do not appear to differentiate most of them from other groups or private practices," the authors wrote.
The authors noted that the American Medical Group Assn. says the "vast majority" of its 370 groups, representing about 110,000 physicians, pay at least partly by volume measured in RVUs.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/01/10/bibf0110.htm.
