Survey puts a price tag on doctors' value to hospitals

While the numbers could help recruiting efforts, some question the accuracy, given the small percentage of responses.

By Cheryl Jackson, AMNews staff. April 15, 2002.

At least one survey is trying to answer the question: How much revenue does a physician generate for a hospital?

According to physician staffing company Merritt Hawkins & Associates, that answer is $1.5 million -- a little more if you're a family physician or an internist, a lot more if you're a cardiovascular surgeon, and a lot less if you're a pediatrician.

The company itself says the results might be a bit skewed, because the majority of survey responses it received were from 200-bed or smaller hospitals serving areas of less than 250,000 people.

Merritt Hawkins surmised that chief financial officers at those facilities would have an easier time calculating physician revenue than would a CFO at a larger hospital. The Irving, Texas-based company sent surveys to 4,000 hospital CFOs and got 153 responses.

Merritt Hawkins said it conducted this survey -- the first of an ongoing series -- to "provide benchmark data hospitals can use as a quantitative analysis of their physician recruiting programs."

The numbers should make hospitals look for ways to help recruit physicians to their communities, said Mark Smith, executive vice president of Merritt Hawkins.

"It probably is a wakeup call for everyone to look at this and say, 'My gosh! Look at what I'm missing out on!' It gives you ability to provide some benchmark to establish the value of your staff," Smith said.

"The hospitals that are more competitive in terms of their income are the ones that attract physicians to the community," he said. [...]