2015 revenues down among practices, healthcare systems

A new survey shows healthcare revenues dropped last year for both private practices and healthcare systems.

Private practices showed an average loss of $13,982 per physician, according to a new survey out from the American Medical Group Association (AMGA). By contrast, health systems lost an eye-popping $211,961 per physician, though Tom Dobosenski, C.P.A., and president of AMGA Consulting warns against reading too much into the discrepancy. “It’s essential . . . to look at the many financial indicators that make up operating performance and compare those details across different organizational structures to gain a better understanding of true financial performance,” he said in an announcement accompanying the survey’s release.

The data in the report are meant to give healthcare exeuctives benchmarks on which to gauge their organizations’ financial performance, according to an article in RevCycle Intelligence. Practices have increasingly focused on tightening their revenue cycles given the massive changes to the healthcare environment and worries over the potential for rising expenses, particularly for small and medium-size  practices as they cope with the coming Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act implementation, per previous reporting by FiercePracticeManagement.

Here are some other key findings from the new survey:

  • Physician salaries represented the top expenditure for medical groups, at 41.6 percent of their net revenue.
  • Medical groups employed more primary care physicians than any other type of provider in 2015, but those physicians’ salaries generally lagged compared to specialists. The survey found that gastroenterologists received the highest median compensation, followed by dermatologists, cardiologists and oncologists.
  • Larger groups tended to employ fewer primary care physicians relative to their size than smaller ones. Where primary care doctors in organizations employing 150 or fewer full-time physicians made up over half the physician workforce, their share dropped to 28 percent in groups with 300 or more physicians on staff.