A Discovery Engagement with a Leading Academic Medical Center
Help your organization lay the foundation for change
A large academic medical center came to SullivanCotter with a familiar challenge: compensation methodologies, productivity expectations, and work effort standards that varied from department to department.
Here’s how we helped them assess the risk and create a go-forward action plan – all while building a coalition with key stakeholders every step of the way.
Challenges
- Significant medical group budget shortfall
- Lack of transparency and engagement from Department Chairs
- Decentralized decision-making and fragmented use of market data resulted in inconsistent benchmarking and work effort expectations
- Compensation and productivity misalignment – including misunderstanding of wRVU levels and clinical FTE
- Inability to track value-based performance due to limited metric reporting
Approach
- Leadership interviews and focus groups to identify pain points and gain consensus on objectives
- Market assessment to understand total cash compensation, productivity, and survey data usage and pinpoint areas of risk
- Work effort review against peers to provide comparative insights both internally and externally
- Department Chair meetings to provide full transparency and level-set the current state
- Summary report to document findings and communicate go-forward recommendations
Analysis
Faculty Physician Compensation and Productivity
- 30% | Balanced | Pay and productivity in alignment
- 20% | Retention Risk | Low TCC relative to productivity
- 20% | Compliance Risk | High TCC relative to productivity
- 30% | Below Market | Pay and productivity under 30th percentile
Outcomes
Culture Shift
Increase in Chair engagement due to greater access to and trust in compensation and productivity benchmarks
Productivity Spotlight
Assessment created greater awareness of financial gaps resulting in Chair acceptance of need to tie compensation to productivity
Clinical Work Effort
Partnership between Chairs and administrative leadership to incrementally increase clinical FTE
Methodology
Development of a compensation committee to standardize methods and processes and establish minimum standards
