Tips for rewarding strong physician leaders

Want to make sure that skilled physician leaders stick with your practice? An article in the Physician Compensation Report outlines several financial options that help to retain doctors with strong leadership skills, including:

• Offer a stipend for managerial work above and beyond their clinical practice
• Offer a variable stipend--perhaps 5 to 7 percent of net income--as an incentive to grow the practice
• Make sure that in a productivity-based system, managers are given equal credit for clinical and managerial days
• Offer bonuses tied to meeting specific goals
• Offer non-monetary rewards, such as extra time off or relief from on-call duty

Be sure to ask the physician leader which of these rewards are likely to be the most satisfying. Ultimately, as long as you're communicating concretely that you value your physician leader's additional contributions, it will go a long way, the experts suggest.

Get more background on physician leader retention:
- read this article from the Physician Compensation Report