HOSPITALISTS ON AVERAGE see bonuses of about $40,000, according to Today’s Hospitalist survey data. But how are those bonuses calculated?
The 2023 Today’s Hospitalist Compensation & Career Survey asked hospitalists if their extra payments were calculated on individual or group performance and what specific metrics factor into those calculations. Here are some details from survey responses.
Individual vs. group performance
Just under one-third (29.1%) of hospitalist bonuses are based on individual performance alone, while 21.7% are based solely on group performance. That leaves just under half (49.2%) of the bonuses hospitalists receive based on a combination of the two.
Among local hospitalist groups, 42.9% of physicians receive bonuses based on individual performance. That percentage is lowest for hospitalists working for multispecialty/primary care groups, where only 14.6% of hospitalists receive bonuses pegged to how they perform individually.
By region, 48.7% of hospitalists in the Southwest reported receiving bonuses based on individual performance.
Bonuses based on group performance are most popular among hospitalists who work for universities and academic medical centers. For hospitalists in those settings, 35.5% received bonuses based on group performance.
Geographically, hospitalists in the Pacific region were the most likely to receive a bonus based on their performance as a group. Among hospitalists in that part of the country, 37.1% received bonuses tied to group metrics.
For more on BONUS AMOUNTS for hospitalists, see our online coverage.
Bonus measures
The most popular metric used to award bonus pay among hospitalists is quality measures like patient satisfaction scores and documentation. Nearly three-quarters of hospitalists (71.4%) said they received bonuses linked to quality.
The use of quality measures was most popular in the Northeast, where 78.4% of hospitalists said such metrics formed the basis of how bonuses were calculated. They were least popular in the Pacific region, although just about two-thirds (65.8%) still reported using them.
Productivity measures like admissions, shifts worked and RVUs were the second most common way hospitalist bonuses were awarded, with 63.0% of hospitalists identifying productivity as influencing their bonus pay.
Such metrics was the most frequently used at national hospitalist management companies (73.5%) and least by multispecialty/primary care groups (57.4%).
Other popular metrics tied to hospitalist bonuses include clinical measures (65.3%), committee work (40.3%) and citizenship (38.2%).
