MGMA Report Highlights Productivity Gains and Rising Physician Compensation Despite Industry's Staffing Shortages

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Medical Group Management Association

May 28, 2024, 10:00 ET

New technologies and increasing financial pressures from inflation have medical group leaders evolving their strategies to meet rising patient demand

ENGLEWOOD, Colo., May 28, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- New research from the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) reveals that healthcare providers are continuing their ongoing recovery from economic and staffing challenges by pushing physician and provider productivity higher than the pandemic-rebound years of 2021 and 2022. The 2024 MGMA DataDive Provider Compensation survey report reflects 2023 data from more than 211,000 physicians and advanced practice providers (APPs).

As heightened expenses and a competitive labor market continue to exert pressure on medical groups, hospitals, and health systems, MGMA's industry-leading data provides crucial benchmarks for effective compensation models to recruit and retain clinicians to deliver high-quality care.

The 2024 MGMA DataDive Provider Compensation includes new benchmarks and filters that illuminate insights on base compensation, hourly APP rates, and collections to total encounters ratio.

Key Report Highlights

Provider compensation increased for the fourth consecutive year among primary care and nonsurgical specialty physicians. The largest gains in total median compensation were for primary care physicians (4.44%) and surgical specialists (4.42%), with nonsurgical specialist physicians seeing only a 1.81% bump in 2023. The primary care and specialist gains managed to keep up with the 3.4% rise in the Consumer Price Index for last year, though five-year changes in physician compensation across all specialty types — dating back to pre-pandemic benchmarks in 2019 — lag the nearly 21% CPI surge in that same period.

For APPs, total median compensation outpaced the gains seen for physicians, with a 6.47% increase in 2023, contributing to a 16.23% gain since pre-pandemic 2019 levels.

The compensation growth was only matched by continued increases in provider productivity: Primary care, surgical specialty and nonsurgical specialty physicians in independent practices all reported higher median work relative value units (work RVUs) in 2023 versus 2022. In hospital-owned practices, median work RVUs were up in 2023 for primary care and surgical specialty physicians, and for APPs.

"Despite being faced with escalating overhead, declining physician reimbursement, and a challenging labor market, medical groups pushed themselves to elevated levels of productivity in 2023, ensuring they could meet the increased demand for care in their communities," said Halee Fischer-Wright, MD, MMM, FAAP, FACMPE, president and chief executive officer at MGMA. "As physician and other staffing shortages persist, medical group leaders should embrace the latest digital technologies to assist in optimizing operations, maintaining access to care and recognizing meaningful cost savings."

Minding money and finding innovation

For a deeper analysis behind the data, MGMA released a summary data report, Provider Pay and the Dawn of a New Era of Productivity, which contextualizes these compensation and productivity benchmark trends with recent polling data from medical group leaders.

While staffing remains a crucial challenge for healthcare leaders, an increasing share of medical group executives point to finance and revenue cycle improvements as their key focus in 2024. Faced with years of hiring difficulties in a tight labor market, MGMA members largely report that they see use of new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), as something that will become an essential skill to successfully lead healthcare provider organizations.

Benchmarking data from other MGMA industry surveys suggests that the resilience reflected in these latest data, at a time of surging expenses for medical groups, point to technological innovations slowly being implemented across the healthcare industry to shift administrative burdens off clinicians to refocus on patient care delivery.

To download the report, visit here.

About MGMA
Founded in 1926, the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) is the nation's largest association focused on the business of medical practice management. MGMA consists of 15,000 group medical practices ranging from small private medical practices to large national health systems representing more than 350,000 physicians. MGMA helps nearly 60,000 medical practice leaders and the healthcare community solve the business challenges of running practices so that they can focus on providing outstanding patient care. Specifically, MGMA helps its members innovate and improve profitability and financial sustainability, and it provides the gold standard on industry benchmarks such as physician compensation. The association also advocates extensively on its members' behalf on national regulatory and policy issues. To learn more, go to MGMA.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Contact:
Emily Dowsett
[email protected]

SOURCE Medical Group Management Association