If you’re a physician going through salary negotiation for an employment contract, you surely know there is a multitude of physician compensation surveys out there. Purchasing them all can be prohibitively expensive, so where do you begin to evaluate them?
And how do you know that they will provide the truest, most up-to-date picture of the market for your specialty in your geographic area?
To help physician job seekers make sense of salary comparison and get all the compensation they deserve, the AMA has teamed up with Resolve, a contract-review and -negotiation firm specializing in physician employment, to provide custom contract review to AMA members at a discount.
Resolve offers personalized legal experience to help physicians secure the best employment contract terms, no matter where they are in their careers. Ready to access your AMA-member Resolve discount? Learn more now.
No single survey says it all
Many long-established sources of physician salary data are the results of employer surveys. While these sources can be useful for getting an idea of fair market value, they have some limitations.
For starters, the data is employer-reported, meaning the numbers can be skewed toward hospital compensation and productivity patterns. In addition, these surveys are only published on an annual basis. Given how quickly the physician job market can change, another resource is needed to ensure physicians are comparing apples to apples during salary negotiations.
If you’re seeking your first physician job post residency, get your cheat sheet now from the AMA.
Look for a real-time resource
Resolve has a proprietary physician compensation dataset, rData, which provides a comprehensive, real-time view of physician employment terms across the U.S.
Unlike reports from other sources, rData is verified with physician-employment contracts. All the salaries, signing bonuses, relocation allowances, and more are derived from actual contracts reviewed by attorneys. The data reflects up-to-date trends in each specialty's job market, providing an unbiased picture for negotiation.
rData is the first ever compensation data source generated directly from physician contracts. Backed by more than 30,000 contracts, it is creating a historic level of transparency in the physician employment market.
Another bonus: A lawyer’s help
With Resolve, you get the irreplaceable guidance of attorneys who specialize in physician employment contracts.
“Employment law is tricky, and representing physicians complicates it even further because physicians are so highly regulated for things that other employees are not,” said Elizabeth A. Snelson, president of Legal Counsel for the Medical Staff PLLC, which specializes in working with medical staffs, medical societies and medical staff professionals. “Your lawyer needs to be someone who does physician employment contracts.”
Snelson is the author of the AMA Physicians’ Guide to Hospital Employment Contracts (PDF), free for AMA members, which provides expert guidance to physicians contemplating, entering into or working under employment contracts with hospitals or related entities. The 83-page guide provides sample language in more than 20 crucial contrzct areas, including peer review, restrictive covenants and even termination.
“I didn't count how many times I said ‘hire a lawyer’ in that guide, but if that's the only lesson that physicians take from it, then it was a smashing success,” Snelson said.
If you’re still not sure whether you need to hire a lawyer to handle your employment contract, simply consider what you might be leaving on the table if you try to go it alone.
“We see an average increase of around $25,000 in compensation following our review,” saidKyle Claussen, CEO of Resolve. “Because we understand what fair-market value is. So if you're willing to negotiate and have an attorney help with the process, it's about a 25x return on investment.”
AMA members receive a 20% discount on all Resolve services. With Resolve, you get:
- Custom contract review for any type of employment contract.
- Access to experienced attorneys who can negotiate on your behalf.
- Real-time, comprehensive compensation data and benchmarks to help you understand your worth.
- An instant contract-review option, powered by Resolve’s attorney-trained AI model.
- Free tools such as a contract scorecard to give a quick overview of where your contract stands.
Ready to access your AMA-member Resolve discount? Learn more now.
