Primary care physicians’ compensation rose by more than 10 percent over the past five years, representing an increase which is nearly double that of specialty physicians’ compensation over the same period, according to the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA).
Officials from the Colorado-based MGMA, attested that the data “is further evidence of the worsening primary care physician shortage in the American healthcare system.”
A closer look at this data—the 2018 MGMA DataDive Provider Compensation—shows that this rise in compensation is not necessarily tied to an increase in productivity. When broken down by primary care focus, family medicine physicians saw a 12-percent rise in total compensation over the past five years, while their median number of work relative value units (wRVUs) remained flat, increasing by less than one percent. Practices offered more benefits to attract and retain physicians, including higher signing bonuses, continuing medical education stipends, and relocation expense reimbursements.
The data for this survey was based on comparative data from more than 136,000 providers in over 5,800 organizations.
“MGMA’s latest survey has put strong data behind a concerning trend we’ve seen in the American healthcare system for some time—we are experiencing a real shortage of primary care physicians,” Halee Fischer-Wright, M.D., president and CEO at MGMA, said in a statement. “Many factors contribute to this problem, chief among them being an increasingly aging population that’s outpacing the supply of chronic care they require. And with a nearly two-fold rise in median compensation for primary care physicians over their specialist counterparts and increased additional incentives, we can now see the premium organizations are placing on primary care physicians’ skills to combat this shortage.”
Further supporting this trend, the new survey identified meaningful growth in compensation for non-physician providers over the past 10 years. Nurse practitioners saw the largest increase over this period with almost 30 percent growth in total compensation. Primary care physician assistants saw the second-largest median rise in total compensation with a 25 percent increase.
The research also revealed that over the past five years, rises in median compensation varied greatly by state. In two states, median total compensation actually decreased for primary care physicians: Alabama (-9 percent) and New York (-3 percent). Many states saw much larger increases in median total compensation compared to the national rate, the top five being Wyoming (41 percent), Maryland (29 percent), Louisiana (27 percent), Missouri (24 percent) and Mississippi (21 percent).
