One needs to do significant planning in advance of engaging anyone, even a physician, as an independent contractor.
Category: Employment
Here, courtesy of Tenet Healthcare and two terminated cardiologists is a lesson about firing physicians . . . and, when not to.
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Here, courtesy of Tenet Healthcare and two terminated cardiologists is a lesson about firing physicians . . . and, when not to.
Here, courtesy of Tenet Healthcare and two terminated cardiologists, is a lesson about firing physicians . . . and, when not to.
What will happen to your hospital contract or to your hospital employment relationship in the event the hospital merges? Will you still be the contract holder? Will you still have a job?
Prevent others from fooling you or, even worse, from you fooling yourself.
In common with other businesses, medical groups often assume that deals and decisions are like on–off switches, yea or nay, thumbs up or thumbs down.
I’ve been thinking today about Pareto-type distribution, you know the “80/20 rule,” and physician employment.
By physician employment, I’m addressing that situation in which there is no opportunity for meaningful ownership by the affected physician. So, for example, becoming an employee in a physician owned group in which there is a track to equal ownership would not fall within the definition of employment for purposes of this post. However, being an employee of a group controlled by a publicly traded company would. Unless, of course, you are one of the control persons who receives a significant stock option. You get the idea.
Certainly, these days, some medical groups can be sold for real value, although I find that the true percentage of groups that have sold/can be sold is a small subset of the total number. Many simply aren’t candidates for any meaningful purchase. Or, sorry to say, for any purchase at all.
So, it’s not as if those groups in which physicians can become true owners offer the likely prospect of some significant payday upon a sale. There are, of course, exceptions – significant size groups that are actually run as true businesses can sell for amounts that return significant capital gains to their owners.
But for those who are owners of groups which do not offer a realistic prospect of sale at a significant price, what value is there in ownership? The answer lies in the value of control and in the value of the notion that there is still the opportunity for an unlimited upside: For compensation that is more, rather than less. For control that is local, not distant. For compensation that is not reduced to feed the bureaucratic machine and outside investors.
For those who view opportunity in healthcare as a fixed-sized pie in which there are only so many slices of a certain size, employment is a meaningful option. Those individuals are, in essence, not simply the 80% in the popular Pareto-type distribution but perhaps the 99% of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. They will play an increasingly important role in healthcare as the shakeout between worker bees and entrepreneurial thinkers accelerates.
Comment or contact me if you’d like to discuss this post.
Mark F. Weiss
Those who are surprised that employers are increasingly turning to part time workers and temps to escape Obamacare are clueless.
What happens when one of the members of your group who is assigned to work at different sites, acts out on his or her bias against working at a particular location, perhaps by showing up late, or by making untoward comments to the staff, or by engaging in some other type of disruptive behavior?
