40% of Staff Positions at Medical Practices Face Higher Costs, Here’s What Doctors Should Do
Physicians and practice managers: brace yourselves.
FierceHealthcare recently reported a new survey of over 1,000 practice managers released by Physicians Practice, a practice management publication. The survey illuminatingly compares the salaries of 10 key staff positions employed by medical practices across the country, based on work experience and region.
For example, the survey found that the highest paid positions are physician assistant, nurse practitioner, and nurse manager, especially in the West.
On the other hand, many staff salaries are relatively low. These positions include medical records clerk, front-desk staff, medical assistant, and medical biller.
What’s more, the top 3 highest paid positions — physician assistant, nurse practitioner, and nurse manager — are paid between 2.5 to 3.5 times more than the 3 lowest paid positions — medical records clerk, front-desk staff, and medical assistant.
The full results of the survey can be found here.
Heating Up
In our analysis of the survey results, we find many of the positions are paid relatively close to the federal minimum wage.
We aggregated the regional salary data into a national heat map of hourly wages for each staff role, by experience level. While this *aggregation method* isn’t a perfect science, it’s a worthwhile glance into the labor cost structure of a typical medical practice.
The heat map below visualizes the wages as a color gradient from red, yellow, to green. Red is closest to federal minimum wage ($7.25), yellow is farther (50th percentile of wages), and green is farthest (100th percentile of wages).
The heat map above clearly shows that medical records clerk, front-desk staff, and medical assistant are closest to the federal minimum, particularly for low experience levels.
A MACRA World
Despite the low wages of these positions, they are critical to medical practice operations.
As MACRA (Medicare and CHIP Reauthorization Act) comes into affect this year, doctors must comply with its regulatory requirements — such as MIPS (Merit-based Incentive Payment System) to receive payments from Medicare — or face penalties.
Since most private practices will not on add staff for MACRA-related duties, this will increase the workload of existing staff, especially the low-wage staff employed to fulfill similar duties such as medical records keeping, billing, and customer service.
Comply or Die
Moreover, many cities and states are raising minimum wages upwards of $15 per hour, which will increase the cost of complying with MACRA regulations — a double whammy for medical practices.
Adjusting for a higher minimum wage ($15.00), the heat map of hourly wages looks substantially hotter. In the heat map below, red is closest the new minimum ($15.00), yellow is farther (50th percentile of wages), green is farthest (100th percentile of wages).
In this new heat map, about 40% of the staff positions are wages are in red, meaning these positions will have face mandatory pay increases.
One way to pay for this is by increasing prices for medical services. But this isn’t a viable option in an industry where higher costs are pricing out patients, curbing practice revenue.
Tech Cools Costs
To deal with higher labor costs and regulatory burdens, practices can implement easy-to-use practice management technology to enhance staff productivity.
Efficiency improving technology proves to be a substantial cost cutter as it saves staff time through automation and frees up their time to better serve patients, which reduces patient turnover.
Not only does this technology enable staff to be more productive, it increases reimbursements from the federal government. For example, MIPS provides bonuses for practices that implement secure messaging, patient satisfaction surveys, and electronic health records, known as “Meaningful Use.”
The Bottom Line
In the post-MACRA world, medical practices must devise a thorough strategy to comply with the new payments system. By adopting practice management technology, practices can comply with MACRA mandates while optimizing staff time and increasing patient retention.
*For the technically minded reader, we aggregated the regional salary data by taking the weighted average of each role and experience level, weighted by the prevalence of respondents in each region. The salaries are converted into an hourly wage, assuming that each role is full time.*
