Specialties see higher pay; primary care not so much

Pay incentives also fall out of favor as physicians opt for compensation based on straight salary or productivity numbers rather than on subjective measures.

By Julie A. Jacob, AMNews staff. Aug. 5, 2002.

Earnings for many specialties rose significantly last year, while compensation for primary care physicians didn't keep pace, according to a survey by the American Medical Group Assn.

AMGA's latest Medical Group Compensation & Productivity Survey reports that median physician compensation rose most steeply for diagnostic radiologists, dermatologists and anesthesiologists, all up more than 9%.

Interventional diagnostic radiology led the survey with a $356,000 median and topped the chart with a 16.3% increase from $306,000.

The survey is based on data from 242 medical groups representing 31,000 physicians. AMGA's members tend to be from large physician groups.

The big increases in compensation for those specialties are driven by supply and demand, said Shawn Schwartz, manager at Minneapolis-based RSM McGladrey Inc., the consulting firm that conducted the survey for AGMA.

"They are having to pay a premium to get those physicians recruited in," said Schwartz.

Compensation for primary care physicians rose only slightly, the result of a greater supply of those doctors, Schwartz said. However, the high percentage of part-time physicians in primary care fields skewed the median compensation downward, noted Schwartz.

Family medicine's median was $145,675, up about 1% from $144,200, and internal medicine paid $150,534, up 4.3% from $144,264.

Another compensation trend is the increasing use of resource-based relative value units to compensate physicians, he said. About 48% of medical groups used RVUs partially or completely to determine physician compensation in 2001, compared with 28% of medical groups in the 2000 survey, said Schwartz. [...]