VIDEO | Enhancing Patient Access in Academic Medical Centers

Academic medical centers operate in an increasingly complex environment – one in which they still need to uphold their tripartite mission of clinical care, teaching, and research.

In the midst of ongoing funding challenges that are impacting financial sustainability, one of the greatest challenges AMCs face is with maintaining patient access.

In this video, Bob Madden explains how SullivanCotter partners with academic medical centers to address these challenges through strategic workforce planning, clear performance expectations, and sustainable compensation design.

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Bob Madden. I’m a Principal with SullivanCotter in our Physician and APP Workforce Practice. I’ve been assisting academic medical centers on all matters physician compensation for nearly 15 years.

Academic medical centers operate in an increasingly complex environment. They need to support their academic and clinical missions in the midst of ongoing funding challenges that impact financial sustainability.

Primary care strategies in AMCs have emerged to strengthen the community footprint, to improve patient access and the continuity of care – which often involves the treatment of highly acute patients. Patient access is almost always at or near the top of the list of ongoing challenges that our AMC clients are facing.

We leverage our data, research, and experience to help. Our physician compensation and productivity dataset includes over 80,000 AMC physicians, with data points on FTE, allocations, compensation, productivity, and pay-to-production ratios. In addition, we collaborate with the American Association of Medical Colleges on numerous research projects including surveys focused on faculty physician recruitment and retention.

So here is what our data research and experience suggest:

1. AMCs are increasing clinical FTEs to refocus efforts on patient access and clinical productivity. The gap in clinical FTE between established and new-hire faculty physicians is as much as 20 percentage points according to current survey findings.
2. The top initiatives cited by AMC leadership from our  AAMC collaborative survey is improving patient access and care delivery alongside changing FTE allocations and work expectations.
3. Primary care is a focal point of growth within most AMCs – not only to improve market share, but also to free up specialists to focus on the specialty and subspecialty care they train for rather than general patient care.
4. Measuring patient access can be challenging. Variation exists in the market with respect to measuring and rewarding patient access and the physician compensation model.

In the midst of an evolving and challenging landscape, SullivanCotter is helping AMCs address their most pressing challenges in a variety of ways:

• We often start by conducting a comprehensive current state assessment to identify improvement opportunities in the following areas, improving patient care delivery by studying and optimizing care models to ensure that all care team members are working at top of license – which can improve patient access.
• We help standardize clinical FTE allocations and methodologies to support patient access while also maintaining adequate time to devote to the academic mission.
• We help implement minimum work expectations, including the core work expectations tied to FTE status and base salary, while also defining criteria for incentive eligibility.
• We help set clear benchmark parameters, including survey source selections and uses to create a common performance measurement platform.
• We also help define clear tracks for faculty whose work effort is predominantly research-focused or clinically-focused. The benchmarking of work expectations and compensation structures should be tailored to reflect these unique work profiles.

Once these foundational elements are in place, we assist AMCs with the development of new or enhanced compensation models to reward top performers across multiple dimensions of performance, such as patient access, in a financially sustainable way.