And why it’s useless in physician job negotiations.
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- Would you accept a lower salary if you could graduate from medical school debt free?
- Proceduralists are now taking salary hits
- Should doctors be on a salary?
- Are academic physicians the next target on the inflated executive salary hit list?
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{ 6 comments }
The numbers don’t add up.
Are those 13,000 TOTAL RVU’s or the physician work component RVU’s (a subset of total RVU’s)? You see total RVU = (physician RVU+geopraphic RVU +malpractice RVU).
13,000*$43= about $560,000 a year in revenue, not over one million.
Unless of course, that 13,000 RVU are only physician component work RVU’s, in which case that would make more sense.
But if that infact is the case that 13K physician component RVU’s are being generated by OB’GYN…let me put that in perspective for you.
If an FP or an IM or a peds doc averaged a level 4 office visit, a 99214 for every visit for an entire year, how many visits a day would they need to see, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year to generate 13,000 physician component RVU’s???
35 patients a day.
12 hour patient contact days?= 3 patients an hour
10 hour patient contact days?=3.5 patients an hour
8 hour patient contact days?=4.4 patients an hour
That’s why volume rules the world in the current system.
How many OB/Gyn docs see 3 patients an hour, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year?
How many docs in any specialty see’s that many encounters a day?
Trying to manage the whole patient, not one organ.
The other more useless terms are”excellent growth potential” and “located in one of the South’s fastest growing communities.”
in response to the happy hospitalist, the specialists are busy doing things the primary care doctor dumped on them, besides seeing patients.
specialists see a different number of patients in a day because they are asked to consider different things.
i like how you lump fp in with im though. in fact, if fp practices ob, the numbers required to generate the rvu’s change rapidly. even if they don’t practice ob, they frequently do a lot more in office procedures than the typical im outpatient physician, altering things. lastly, the fp patient population typically includes more younger healthier adults, and children of course, allowing them to have quicker visits.
kind of off topic, but i agree with the original poster who says competitive salary is meaningless.
i don’t know why people focus so much on salary. i would hope they focus much more on whether they fit in with the practice and whether they could happily live in the area. of course, whether the practice is healthy and well run is important, but there are many, many, many other issues to consider.
anon, the post had nothing to do with dumping. It was a statement of fact that in order to generate those kind of RVU’s with only cognitive interactions (ie not procedures), it would require an unsustainable office practice.
That’s all I was saying.
does anyone ever believe those statistics regarding income anyway?
i don’t know where they come from, and secondly when we were looking for jobs, we never got anything near what those things said we would.
We all have to try to get a sense of what we people generally earn doing what we do–which means much more than specialty. I know some MGMA groups in my specialty where the door doesn’t hit them on the ass as they fly out at 4:55 every day. At some other locations in that same multisite group, docs in the same specialty work 12 hour days.
Some have residents and midlevels enhancing productivity. Some don’t. Some go in nights and weekends–some never have to.
Some take all payers–others have carved out boutique practices within the group.
So what do averages mean?
In the end, after all the numbers are handed out, what is your net, what do you think it should be for your particular work load? Can you reconcile that.
One problem is, you can’t know going in. Medical directors and recruiters lie, and the they lie some more, and then they lie again. Read Arrowsmith even though it was written nearly a hundred years ago. That doctors experience at the fictional Roundtree clinic was my experience at the very real ****** clinic.
Even if you have that rare species–someone with an MBA who is telling the truth about your salary prospects—the system will change, probably at least every year if not more often.
I recommend to younger doctors:
Spend the money to get the MGMA survey yourself if looking for employed positions. Market research on your product is a good investment–and your labor is your product. Go in with a few other people and split if if you have to.
Whenever possible, skip the recruiters altogether. They are like real estate agents–their job is to close the deal. If you, and your employer, are unhappy with the match a year later, they still got paid.
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