HCAD 5387
Summer 2015
Ed Schumacher
Data Exercise 3
You work for Trinity Health System, a large national private not-for-profit health system that
employs a large number of physicians. Their flagship system is Tiger Health. You have been
asked to help with a project examining physician compensation and productivity. The
spreadsheet titled “Physician Data.Xlxs” contains the data you will need to complete the
analysis. There are 5 specific specialties that you are especially interested in (anesthesia,
emergency medicine, hospitalist, pathology, and radiology). There are two types of physicians:
Clinical and Medical Directors. There are 5 tabs in the spreadsheet:
Physician Data – contains individual information on the physicians in your health
system
Specialty Mapping – provides a table to map a large number of specialty descriptions to
a) MGMA compensation benchmarks, and b) the 5 specialties of focus plus other.
RVU Benchmarks – provides RVU benchmarks from MGMA data by the smaller set of
specialties
MGMA Physician Comp Benchmarks – provides MGMA clinical physician
compensation benchmarks for the MGMA specialty list
Medical Director Benchmarks – provides similar data but for medical directors – both
hourly and annually
Part I – Physician Compensation
1. First determine the total compensation for each physician. Note that physicians can be
paid annually, hourly, by the week, by the month, or other ways. One year of work =
2080 hours, 52 weeks, or 365 days. Also note the FTE information.
2. Next calculate for each physician, the Total Compensation Benchmarks (per FTE) at the
10th, 25th, median, 75th, and 90th percentiles.
3. Calculate the Total Compensation Savings (Variance) at each of these percentiles for
each physician. For example, if the physician was paid at the median for their specialty,
how much would the health system save? In the instance where the physician’s
compensation is below the benchmark level, leave that cell blank.
4. For the 5 named specialties (anesthesia, emergency medicine, hospitalist, pathology, and
radiology), what would the total savings to the system be if physicians were paid at these
various benchmarks? Create a table that shows the specialists on the left column, then
the total spend, savings at the 50th and 75th percentiles, by clinical and medical director,
as well as totals.
5. For which specialty is the opportunity for savings the greatest?
6. Next create a similar table but instead of doing it by specialty, construct it by hospital.
What does this table tell us?
7. Create a tab in the spreadsheet titled “Part I” at the far left tab that has the two summary
tables (parts 4 and 6) along with your observations.
Part II – Physician Productivity
1. Create a dashboard for Tiger Health that for each (clinical) physician indicates their
compensation and their productivity. For compensation create a green light for those
physicians whose compensation is below the 25 percentile, and red light for those above
the 75th percentile. For productivity, create a green light for those physicians whose
productivity is above the 75th percentile, and red for those whose productivity is below
the 25th percentile.
2. Using the dashboards you created what recommendations do you have for Tiger Health in
terms of contract renegotiations?
3. Create a Tab in the worksheet titled “Part II” next to the Part I tab that contains the
dashboard and your observations.
Notes: The deliverable is your completed spreadsheet. This should be something that is as
stand-alone as possible (that is, someone who doesn’t know the assignment should be able to
figure out what is going on pretty quickly). Think of the document as something that will be
circulating throughout your organization with your name attached to it (so I will be assigning
style points).