Most physicians have little to no formal business training. The only negotiating we do is with our patients, trying to convince them to take a statin to bring that total cholesterol value back under 300.
On the other hand, those that prepare our contracts often have business degrees. They negotiate contracts for a living, and their incentives and interests are rarely aligned with yours. It’s not a fair fight.
When I graduated from my residency in OBGYN in 2017, I went from making $49,000 per year to $250,000. Little did I know, one of my fellow residents was only making $235,000, at basically the same job, while another just got offered upwards of $350,000 just a few miles up the street.
Especially in my field of OBGYN, we’re a field heavily dominated by female physicians. Female physicians are historically known to have drastically lower salaries than our male counterparts and women are also known to be less likely to negotiate.I was wrong.
Because these survey data sets are expensive to purchase, they are often prohibitory for individual clinicians to access. In order to obtain information that is pertinent to your field and situation, you can contact a physician contract lawyer or company who owns this data set and can pull and share the MGMA data on your behalf.