Benchmark Changes and the Impact of COVID-19

Healthcare provider organizations have experienced an incredible amount of uncertainty over the last year and a half. With the pandemic upending life as we know it, providers have adapted on the fly and met the challenge head-on. And while COVID-19 has certainly had an impact on how providers interact with patients, so, too, has it affected the benchmarks around physician compensation and productivity.

We examine some of those impacts in the infographic below.

Notably, physician compensation in 2021 dropped only 1% to 2% when compared to 2020 data, likely in part due to the efforts by healthcare organizations to protect providers during this time. Not surprisingly, productivity decreased approximately 7% to 8% over the same period. As a result, many provider organizations were compensating their physicians at a much higher effective rate of pay per WRVU rate during this time, which has significant implications for how organizations use and interpret the published 2021 benchmarks.

The above infographic is just a snapshot of what changes the benchmarks have undergone over the last year. Please join Josh Halverson and Maria Hayduk on December 9 for further detail regarding the impacts of changes to the benchmark data, as well as a deeper discussion around best practices for provider compensation planning during such uncertain times.