Our 2019 report highlights the growing significance of physician contracts as a major component of hospital spending, with particular growth in payment for hospital-based physician services such as hospitalists, intensivists and laborists.
When it comes to physician contracting expenses at hospitals and health systems, call coverage contracts often make up a significant percent of the total spending. As common sense would suggest, larger facilities pay more for call coverage than smaller facilities.
Over the past decade, spending for physician expenditures as a percent of total hospital operating expenditures has grown over 40% according to OSHPD data. Costs will escalate when a hospital starts to compensate one specialty, which will create a domino effect with others.
Recent settlements and advisories offer a number of lessons to help shape effective contract compliance programs.
MD Ranger data strongly suggests the benefits of multi-facility physician contracts as an important strategy for controlling costs.
Most economists, as well as the OIG, believe that an exclusivity clause has economic value that should be considered in a valuation.
To be compliant, it is first necessary to determine the need to pay, then to determine how much.
Establishing a fair and compliant payment rate for a position that does not need a particular type of specialist can be a challenge!
We’ve seen hospital administrators struggle to determine what is appropriate for their organization. The truth is that opportunity cost can be difficult to measure and document.
Risks for overpayments are things like paying above FMV, or paying for too many hours per administrative deal are straightforward to discover with careful review and analysis of contracts.
Stacking has come to greater prominence following an OIG advisory opinion that defines problematic compensation structures.
We recently spoke with Gail Peace, CEO of Ludi, about how hospitals are managing physician contracts from both an operational and finacnial perspective
Though rates at the individual service level remain relatively stable year over year, overall physician costs paid by hospitals have skyrocketed in the last decade.
A theme throughout the Compliance Institute was that shopping for FMV valuations conflicts with FMV being based on an “independent third party opinion”.
In looking at numerous recent settlements, we can see that physician compensation is a hot topic for hospitals.
Establishing a fair and compliant payment rate for a position that does not need a particular type of specialist can be a challenge!
MD Ranger’s analytic tools generate an Executive Summary which provides day-to-day compliance and physician contracting staff a report to share with executives and the board.
Most physician payment rates fall within a reasonable market range. But in some cases, a payment rate may be well beyond the norm. These unusual payment rates, which can sometimes impact benchmark calculations, are outliers.
We’ve seen hospital administrators struggle to determine what is appropriate for their organization. The truth is that opportunity cost can be difficult to measure and document.
Market data is an efficient and cost effective way to structure a physician contracting compliance program, and is used by hundreds of hospitals across the country.
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