We recently looked at both call coverage and medical direction analysis from MD Ranger’s 2017 physician contracting benchmarks. Let’s examine hospital-based service contracts and what components make up these sorts of agreements.
As the graph displays, the plurality of hospital-based service contracts for all services pay for only medical direction, with 33% of agreements involving only this component in the contract. However this component type breakdown varies significantly by service. For instance, stipends are the most common payment type for Hospitalists, Laborists, and Intensivists. For some services, such as Emergency, Pathology, and Radiology, agreements with only medical directorship payments or unpaid agreements are common.
The percent of contracts in each component combination have remained stable year over year in our benchmarks. The largest drop we have seen this year, when compared with 2016, is a drop in coverage only components from 16% to 8%.
Conversely, hospital-based contracts involving stipends saw slight increases since last year. Stipend only components jumped from 19% up to 23% while agreements containing stipends and other components rose from 13% to 17%.
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