2012 Payment rates for physician service contracts stabilize
MD Ranger Fourth Annual Physician Contract Benchmark Reports
<0> MD RangerAllison Pullins, 650-692-8873Director </0>
released its fourth annual benchmark reports today. The reports detail payment rates for hospital-based physician services, medical direction, leadership, administrative, call coverage, and diagnostic testing services. Data is drawn from 9,000 contracts from 309 hospitals in 27 states with benchmarks for over 200 physician services. New this year, MD Ranger benchmarks include data for total hospital spending on non-employed physician contracts, showing a range of $2 million to $14.8 million from the 25 to 90 percentiles. As a subscriber-based product that collects all physician contract data, MD Ranger sheds insight on the type and range of payments for a broad scope of services.
Year-over-year analysis found that more than 80% of contracts had no change in rates, and only 4% of administrative and 7% of coverage contracts had rate increases. The average increase across all contracts was 1% compared to over 4% last year.
MD Ranger President Penny Stroud states, “MD Ranger’s 2012-13 Benchmark series demonstrate the significance of physician services as a major component of hospital costs for hospitals and health systems. The good news is that the rate of increase has declined.”
Significant findings from the include:
Geography is a frequent concern of providers, and MD Ranger continues to find no correlation to rates. MD Ranger has considerable geographic diversity, with hospitals in 27 states covering dozens of rural and urban areas. Extensive testing of geographic clusters of MSAs, combinations of MSAs, and urban/rural distinctions, found no statistically significant geographic variation. Craig Paxton, Ph.D., chief statistician and economist at MD Ranger, summarized, “Based on four years of data, we conclude that geographic variation, if meaningful at all, is so only in markets smaller than MSA’s.”