WHAT FACTORS are used to calculate hospitalist bonuses? According to data from our most recent annual survey, group and individual performance play a big role, and so do traditional metrics like quality.
Our survey found that nearly half of hospitalists—42%—are paid based on a combination of both salary and incentives. On average, hospitalists earn about $43,000 of their annual income from bonuses and incentives.
Just over one-quarter of adult hospitalists (26.1%) who get bonus dollars said those incentives are based on the performance of their group. Slightly more (29.8%) said their bonuses were based instead on individual incentives.
But nearly half (44.1%) of adult hospitalists said that their bonuses were based on a combination of individual and group-based incentives.
Pediatric hospitalists, on the other hand, were much more likely to receive bonuses based on group performance alone, with 43% saying group incentives were the basis of their incentive compensation.
What bonus factors are incentivized?
For adult hospitalists, 72.1% said traditional quality measures like satisfaction scores and documentation were used to build their incentive pay. That was the most common factor used in bonus calculations.
Productivity measures—shifts worked, RVUs—were a close second, with 62.1% of adult hospitalists saying such measures was also part of their bonus equation.
At national hospitalist management companies, productivity seemed to be more commonly used to calculate bonuses. While 62.1% of all hospitalists said productivity was a factor in their bonuses, that percentage spiked to 73.3% for physicians with national hospitalist management companies.
While 35.6% of hospitalists working for hospitals and hospital corporations said that citizenship factored into their bonuses, that percentage fell to 16.2% for physicians in local hospitalist groups. It was slightly higher at national hospitalist management companies—23.3%—but still well below the average for all adult hospitalists of 30.2%.
Among academic hospitalists, committee work was less commonly used in bonuses: 21.4% of academic hospitalists said committee work influenced their bonuses, compared to 29.8% of nonacademics.
It was the opposite for safety measures. Among academic hospitalists, 21.4% said safety measures influenced their pay, compared to 11.6% of nonacademics.
What factors go into hospitalist bonuses?
• Quality measures: 72.1%
• Productivity: 62.1%
• Clinical measures: 58.1%
• Citizenship: 30.2%
• Committee work: 27.0%
• Safety: 12.3%
• Other: 7.4%
VIEW DATA ON HOSPITALIST PAY from both the 2024 and the 2023 Today’s Hospitalist Compensation & Career Surveys. Our annual surveys examine how hospitalist compensation is affected by factors such as the type of patients hospitalists treat, the number of shifts they work, the number of patients they see per shift and more.
