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MGMA: Medical Director Duties, Compensation Vary Widely

 |  By Margaret@example.com  
   May 04, 2011

Being a medical director can be nice work if you can get it. A physician medical director can add several thousand or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to his or her compensation package for duties that can range from recruitment, attending meetings, conducting clinical peer reviews, and strategic development.

Compensation for medical directors varies widely across specialties as well as practice ownership, a Medical Group Management Association survey shows. Duties and responsibilities can also play a role although the survey didn't collect that information by specialty.

MGMA's Medical Directorship and On-Call Compensation Survey: 2011 Report, based on specialty, shows that the lowest median annualized compensation, $7,500, was reported by internists and pediatricians. The highest, $208,000, was reported by radiation oncologists.

Depending on the specialty, practice ownership (hospital-owned or nonhospital-owned) also affects medical director compensation. Psychiatrists in a hospital-owned practices earned $25,000 while their counterparts in nonhospital-owned practices earned four times as much annually for medical director duties. On the other hand, family practitioners (with obstetrics) earned almost twice as much for being medical directors in hospital-owned practices as in nonhospital-owned practices: $24,000 versus $12,500. 

The majority of survey participants reported median annualized compensation levels of $50,000 or less. Only four specialties reported annualized medical director compensation of more than $50,000: radiation oncologists, nephrologists, pathologists, and urologists.

The top three medical director duties listed by survey respondents were monitoring quality, developing policies and procedures, and attending meetings, Todd Evenson, assistant director of surveys at MGMA, explained in an interview.

The survey doesn't identify by specialty the compensation received for particular duties or responsibilities. It does provide duty and responsibility information in large physician categories: primary care, surgical specialists, and nonsurgical specialists. Here are some examples:

Meeting Responsibilities. Attending meetings increased compensation for nonsurgical specialist by 8.6% versus medical directors in that category without that responsibility — $43,421 annually compared with $40,001.

Documentation and care planning. Surgical specialist without this responsibility made 26.5% more than their counterparts with this duty. But primary care medical directors without documentation and care planning duties earned 6.3% less than their counterparts.

Recruitment. Primary Care medical directors with recruitment responsibilities reported $27,500 in compensation, compared to $20,000 for primary care directors without that responsibility.

According to the majority of survey respondents, being a medical director takes about four to six hours per week. Anatomical and clinical pathologists reported the greatest number of hours worked per week in a medical directorship (31 hours) while noninvasive cardiologists reported only three hours per week.

The voluntary on-line survey, which was conducted between October and December in 2010, contains data on 1,529 medical directorships in 255 medical organizations.

The report is available here.
 

 

Margaret Dick Tocknell is a reporter/editor with HealthLeaders Media.
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