With permission from the participants, TCTMD presents their conversations for the benefit of the cardiology community.
Your feedback is welcome—feel free to comment at the bottom of the page. Practices are still mixed 4 years later, but there seems to be growing support for the idea that extra hours merit extra pay. Do you get compensated for being on call, and if so, who pays and how much? I don't take call anymore. I'm salaried. On-call time was never paid extra. Let's see what others say. But if I would have a gap when I urgently needed coverage I would step in, which I have.
Now, the staff can take call at other facilities within our organization and they will get paid by that campus by changing the cost center, with in some cases receiving an additional bonus for doing so. Never been paid for call. Lloyd W. In most academic and employment model private hospitals, administration will argue that on-call stipends are built into the contract. That of course is nonsense if market rates are considered. There will also be discussions as to other offsetting benefits the hospital provides to the practice, including unassigned noninvasive tests.
For a payment system for on call to flourish, specific conditions must be in place that afford a practice independence of hospital compensation and a realistic threat of not taking call. These might include competition among several groups who practice at several locations, or an independent single group. Increasingly, these kinds of arrangements are disappearing precisely because hospital administrations see this as a threat to control and diminishing costs, and they are right.
I have been through this battle at several hospitals in the past. Compromise is the only real solution for physicians until we regain independence either by contract or by unionization, neither of which are likely any time soon. I have to jump in here. All physician compensation is related in some way to productivity, which is appropriate. In contrast, private interventionalists almost always take call for both STEMI and consults, and they find the model works nicely to help generate revenue and build their clientele.
