The Basics of Negotiating Your First Physician Contract
Negotiating your first physician contract influences the rest of your life – beyond your professional career. Use every resource to assure the best outcome.
Negotiating your first physician contract influences the rest of your life – beyond your professional career. Use every resource to assure the best outcome.
Unlike at Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average,” this health system believes that all physician compenstation should be average.
It’s time that we recognize that the problem with American healthcare isn’t the physicians, it’s the system that doesn’t allow our physicians to do what they’ve been trained so well to do.
Without cause termination in physician employment contracts can be stressful for the physician, but there are beneficial aspects that can be exploited.
A rant about hospital negotiations, from a physician’s lawyer who has been in the trenches with these David and Goliath battles.
Once you have had your physician employment agreement reviewed, it’s important that you take full advantage of the analysis.
The bottom line on physician covenants not to compete is that the market will enforce the covenant as written, even if a court probably wouldn’t.
No matter what the recruiter/office manager/department head tells you, every employer is willing to tweak your physician employment contract.
Although a letter of intent for a physician employment or practice sale agreement may not be legally binding, it’s important not to restrict yourself.
Here are a few things that every physician needs to know about medical record provisions in physician employment agreements.
What you need to know about negotiating physician employment agreements BEFORE you get too deeply involved in the recruitment process.
Some employers take a chance on hiring new physicians, shifting the risk of insufficient work to the physician through physician productivity compensation.
On May 21, the OIG posted an Advisory Opinion that specifically allowed a hospital to compensate physicians for on-call services to uninsured patients.
After purchasing the physician contract review, you will receive an email asking you to transmit the agreement and any concerns you have to me. Many physicians do this by email, but I will be available by phone, too. In three business days from the time you purchase the Physician Prosperity Program® and transmit the draft physician employment agreement along with any concerns you have about the agreement and the information I will need to perform the MGMA analysis, you will receive a detailed physician contract review letter from me.
After you receive my physician contract review letter, you will have the opportunity to discuss it with me, to make sure all of your concerns were met, and to correct any factual inaccuracies, or to point out things that were verbally promised but didn’t make it into the physician employment agreement. These discussions, and revisions of the letter following these discussions, are included in the initial fixed fee.
Once you are completely comfortable with the physician contract review letter, you transmit the letter to your potential employer.