More Survey Data on Compensation for Anesthesiologists and Other Physicians
The amount of physician compensation is one of the key issues in every negotiation between anesthesiologists and anesthesiology groups and hospitals or health systems. What is the fair market value for an anesthesiologist? And how much do you have to offer to attract him or her? There is no definitive set of data, just a handful of surveys, some free and some for sale at hefty prices. Practices that are sufficiently large or that have a long history often realize that their own internal information may be the best available. In the interest of covering as many bases as possible and providing the greatest amount of data on which interested readers may perform their meta-analyses, we bring to your attention the latest public physician compensation information, released last week by Modern Healthcare in its Physician Compensation: 2015 report.
For 2015, Modern Healthcare reports an average salary for anesthesiologists of $384,290, which comes from 11 different organizations: American Medical Group Association, Cejka Search, Compdata Surveys, ECG Management Consultants, Hay Group, Hospital & Healthcare Compensation Service, Jackson & Coker, Medicus, MGMA, Pacific Companies and Pinnacle Health. The range is from $321,666 to $445,043. (The report does not distinguish between academic and private practice.) Specialties with higher average figures are:
Orthopedics, cardiology and gastroenterology also came in with higher averages than anesthesiology in Medscape’s last several reported surveys.
Modern Healthcare’s maximum value for anesthesiology, $445,043, came from MGMA, with whose annual surveys many readers are familiar and in which many anesthesia groups participate. MGMA survey data undergo a rigorous validation process and thus may have more credibility than some of the other figures on Modern Healthcare’s list, which is as follows (with the names of the organizations contributing the values omitted):
$321,666.00
$338,784.00
$346,323.00
$361,000.00
$371,000.00
$384,290.01
$400,857.14
$401,000.00
$407,000.00
$416,094.00
$418,423.00
$445,043.00
On the other hand, Medscape reported an average annual anesthesiologist salary of $358,000 early this year in its Anesthesiologist Compensation Report. As we discussed in our Alert dated May 11, the Medscape study had one of the larger absolute response rates (n=1179), but there is not enough information published to determine the reliability of the data. The best way for us to readily assess the data from all of the public surveys is to obtain as many data points as possible, across different sources and over time—bearing in mind that the various reports tend to differ in whether they include benefits or such additional factors as call coverage payments in their implicit definitions of “compensation.”
One other accessible source of compensation is the anesthesiologist job postings on GasWork.com. A review of the available positions on Gas Work shows that the five non-academic, full time openings offering the highest maximum starting salaries are as follows:
The five open positions with the lowest minimum starting salaries are:
The range of anesthesiologists’ salaries is huge on GasWork, which is hardly surprising given that a single position (in Nevada) starts at the minimum of the range ($220,000) and, at the high end, may pay as much as all but one of the advertised openings. The majority of jobs on GasWork appear to be in the mid $350,000 to high $400,000 range, depending on factors such as subspecialization, e.g., pain or TEE certification, cardiac training, call schedules, single vs. multispecialty groups and, of course, geography. GasWork data can be helpful, but less so unless there are several positions with the same characteristics as the one being negotiated.
In sum, compensation survey data are a starting point for determining what an anesthesiologist might expect to earn. The nature and the requirements of each position are going to have a very large impact on the actual figure. Nevertheless, as we said in May, “negotiations over anesthesiologists’ compensation often involve third party surveys. As in all negotiations, it is important to know the information available to the other party—” and that includes the Modern Health survey as well as GasWork data.