Compensation in Times of Change KEEPING UP WITH CHANGES IN PHYSICIAN PAY If you think the practice of medicine has been changing fast, that’s nothing compared to changes in compensation for the practice of medicine. It used to be, in the not-so-distant past, that physicians would receive a contract outlining an offer with such things as how much call they would take, their allotted vacation time and, yes, their salary. Negotiating, if the doctor chose to do it, was largely a matter of trying to improve the numbers on the contract.
Compensation models are changing The basics of this process haven’t changed— there’s still a contract, an offer, and items such as vacation and call to review before negotiating or
signing. But salary? According to Melissa Yu, MD, FAAN, that model of compensation may no longer dominate. As chair of the American Academy of Neurology subcommittee that oversees that group (the Practice Management and Technology Subcommittee) she has seen a wide variance in pay models other than just strict salary. To be sure, some of the variations in compensation methodology Yu experienced were tied to changes she initiated. For example, when Yu moved to academia after eight years in private practice, (she’s now an associate professor in Baylor College of Medicine’s Department of Neurology), she naturally entered into a different payment
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