Collective Strength in Physician Contract Negotiations: Why Groups Succeed Where Individuals Struggle
Negotiating as a group of 4 physicians or 20+ amplifies your voice and significantly increases your negotiation power. Learn how our strategic approach to group negotiations helps secure better pay and working conditions, ensuring every physician in your group is valued and fairly compensated.
Are You Facing These Common Negotiation Challenges?
Navigating group contracts can be daunting and time-consuming. Getting all of your colleagues on the same page to work with the administration is challenging. Many physicians find themselves grappling with complex issues that can undermine their professional satisfaction and financial well-being, or worse; many just ignore the compensation issue altogether. Here’s how these challenges might be affecting your group.
Problems
Outdated Contract Models
Is your group working under an agreement that hasn’t been updated in years, potentially leaving you behind current market standards?
Inequitable Compensation
Do you feel your group’s compensation isn’t commensurate with the workload or market trends, especially given your high performance and productivity levels?
Staffing and Resource Allocation
Are discrepancies in staffing and resource allocation causing burnout or dissatisfaction within your group?
Negotiation Isolation
Does the administration try to isolate or fragment your group, perhaps offering different terms to different members, undermining bargaining efforts?
Lengthy and Inflexible Negotiation Cycles
Are you stuck in prolonged negotiation cycles with inflexible timelines that don’t reflect your group’s needs or the pace of change in healthcare?
Solutions
Outdated Contract Models
We employ the latest market data and regional standards, utilizing tools better than employers to ensure your contracts are current and competitive. Our approach is rooted in open and honest communication, transparency, and efficiency. We avoid secret formulas to openly define what ‘fair market’ means for your group. Unlike hospitals that often withhold their FMV analysis, we provide factual, unbiased data to determine your group’s market value.
Inequitable Compensation
Our custom approach aligns your group’s compensation with your level of performance, ensuring fair compensation based on real-time industry benchmarks. We also look at the story behind the situation — there are often situations where the story matters as much as the numbers.
Staffing and Resource Allocation
We advocate for equitable resource distribution and staffing solutions that reflect your group’s actual needs and workload.
Negotiation Isolation
Our team includes former hospital administrators, so we understand the insider tactics used to fragment a group because we’ve been on the other side of the table. This unique perspective allows us to effectively counter divide-and-conquer strategies, ensuring fair and cohesive bargaining for your group.
Lengthy and Inflexible Negotiation Cycles
We streamline the negotiation process, setting strategic timelines to ensure timely and effective contract renewals. With our expertise, negotiations typically take 2 to 6 months, compared to up to 18 months or more without our assistance.
How It Works: Streamlined Process for Effective Group Negotiations
Understanding our process is as simple as 1-2-3. We’ve honed our approach to ensure every step is clear, transparent, and designed to bring you the best possible outcomes for your group negotiations.
Process Steps
Discovery Call
Start with a complimentary 30-minute discovery call, during which we learn about your group’s specific needs, challenges, and goals. This information helps us tailor our approach to your unique situation.
Contract and Market Analysis
Our team thoroughly analyzes your current contracts alongside a custom detailed assessment. We use advanced tools and resources previously available to hospitals, ensuring the highest industry knowledge and technology level. No other firm provides this level of expertise. We identify key areas for improvement, from compensation to workload balance, ensuring everything aligns with industry standards and your group’s expectations.
Strategy Development
Our process begins with a comprehensive analysis of your group’s needs, desires, and the broader market context. We then develop a strategic plan tailored to your group, incorporating detailed compensation calculations and fair market value (FMV) analysis. Working closely with you, we ensure that the strategy meets your expectations and positions you advantageously within the current market. We transform these objectives into actionable strategies, steering the negotiation to secure the best possible outcomes.
Negotiation, Finalizing, and Review
With the strategic plan in place, we represent your group in negotiations with the hospital or employer. We handle all communications, advocating effectively for your interests to secure improved contract terms that reflect your group’s value and contributions. Once an agreement is reached, we review the proposed changes with your group, ensuring satisfaction and understanding. We assist with finalizing the contract and ensuring all new terms are correctly incorporated by the employer.
Ongoing Support and Follow-Up
After the contract is signed, we remain available to answer further questions and provide support. We ensure you’re fully confident with the new terms and help plan for future renegotiations to keep your contracts up-to-date.
Every step of our process is crafted with the utmost care and personalized to each group, leveraging our extensive expertise in healthcare negotiations. We ensure your group not only achieves but exceeds its negotiation goals. Let’s take the first step together.
Meet The Team
Jon Appino, MBA – Founder, Contract Diagnostics
Jon Appino is the Principal and Founder of Contract Diagnostics and has been passionate about helping individual physicians for over 13 years. As his experience grew, he realized the value of physicians speaking in a unified voice when discussing contracts and compensation with employers. As consolidation in the healthcare space continues, physicians having transparent, open, and honest conversations with their employers has never been more important. He has created and staffed the Group Division with leading industry experts, bringing decades of experience to the negotiating table for physicians and physician groups nationwide. Along with Anu and Jennifer, Jon can change the dialogue between physician groups and their employers. Jon is passionate about this work, which shows in everything he does.
Anu Murthy, Esq.
Anu Murthy is a distinguished healthcare and intellectual property attorney and practice consultant specializing in group engagements for physicians, dentists, and advanced care practitioners. A proud alumna of the Boston University School of Law, Anu is a staunch advocate for the collective power of thorough contract explanation, negotiation, and drafting in safeguarding the success and protection of healthcare groups. With a rich history of leadership roles across various healthcare ecosystems—including academic institutions, not-for-profit organizations, and private equity sectors—Anu has spearheaded initiatives in recruitment, service line expansion, and practice acquisitions tailored for group practices.
In 2020, Anu redirected her focus towards leveraging her deep-seated expertise to benefit healthcare groups, assisting them in navigating the complex business aspects of their professional endeavors. Her extensive background affords her clients a distinctive advantage in reviewing healthcare transactions, while her comprehensive industry network provides critical insights into group-specific market trends. Anu’s unique insider perspective, combined with her unwavering commitment to the collective interests of her clients, distinguishes her in her field, making her an invaluable ally to physician groups seeking to maximize their contractual outcomes.
Her experience and knowledge facilitate a nuanced review of healthcare transactions, guaranteeing a competitive advantage for her clients. A diverse national network of contacts throughout the healthcare industry gives her the inside track on market trends and how to capitalize on them. She was on the ‘other side’ for decades and is now on yours.
Jennifer Thomson, Esq.
As an attorney with Dinsmore & Shohl, LLP and part of their healthcare and public policy team, Jennifer is available to clients who would benefit from her combined healthcare legal and financial focus. With an impressive blend of legal expertise, accounting acumen, and a profound understanding of healthcare consulting, Jennifer specializes in leading group negotiation divisions tailored for healthcare professionals, particularly focusing on physician and provider groups. Her career has been marked by a dedication to ensuring strategic alignment through thoughtful physician and provider compensation models bolstered by robust management skills, strategic and analytical thinking, problem-solving capabilities, and exceptional communication and presentation skills. Jennifer aims to drive best practices within healthcare organizations, fostering an environment that supports professional growth and positively contributes to organizational success.
With an extensive background, including over three decades of dedicated service at a major, well-known hospital system, she played a pivotal role in the strategic expansion of their physician network. With prior executive leadership responsibilities for physician compensation and contract management at that organization, Jennifer spearheaded the designing, implementing, and managing of physician compensation frameworks, supporting the system’s growth to over 1,500 employed providers through meticulous contract negotiations and transaction support for key acquisitions.
Throughout Jennifer’s tenure, she honed skills beneficial to physician group negotiations, including contract management, healthcare consulting, cross-team collaboration, and strategy alignment. Her analytical ability, CPA certification, and legal and financial expertise enable her to offer comprehensive solutions to complex challenges in the physician alignment and compensation world. Jennifer was on the hospital side of thousands of physician and group negotiations in the past, and now she brings her expertise to YOUR side. Dinsmore & Shohl, LLP is a national law firm independent of Contract Diagnostics and does not have a partnership or referral arrangement with Contract Diagnostics.
She is passionate about this work, and it shows.
FAQs: Addressing Your Concerns
Do you have questions? We’ve got answers. Here are some of the most common queries we receive about our group negotiation services. Would you prefer to speak with us instead? Schedule a complimentary 30-minute inquiry call with us here.
What makes Contract Diagnostics different from other contract negotiation services?
Unlike other services that may offer a broad range of legal assistance, Contract Diagnostics specializes solely in physician contract reviews and negotiations. This focus, combined with our team of experts, including attorneys, physicians, and former hospital executives, ensures that we bring a deep understanding and specialized expertise to every negotiation.
How do you ensure confidentiality and trust during negotiations?
Can you help with group contracts in all states?
What if our employer is resistant to negotiating with a third party?
How long does the negotiation process typically take?
What happens if we cannot reach an agreement with our employer?
Are there additional costs for multiple rounds of negotiation or extended services?
Will involving a third party in our negotiations damage our good relationship with the administration?
“Jon, thanks for being part of this process. We haven’t done it like this before with any group, but it was seemingly quicker and smoother than hosting all the meetings and PowerPoint presentations with the physicians. You were able to get them all on the same page and move through the process efficiently. I was unsure at first, but I’m now a proponent of what you are doing there at Contract Diagnostics.” – Nick
How can we trust an external consultant with sensitive contract details?
What if the proposed changes do not align with our needs or the hospital’s capabilities?
Are the costs of your services justified by the outcomes?
Can you handle negotiations in specialized medical fields or with complex organizational structures?
I don’t want to upset the hospital.
Hospitals frequently bring in their advisors and consultants for essential negotiations. It makes sense for physicians with limited time and minimal negotiation experience to do the same. We’ve done this many times, and in most situations, the hospital welcomes our participation as it improves the process, speeds it up, and ensures everyone is on the same page with reasonable expectations.
“Working with Jon and his team was a professional and respectful process. Their team understood both parties’ wants and needs and was of great value in ensuring a reasonable agreement was reached.” – Nick
Is group negotiation the same as collective bargaining?
No, group negotiation is different from collective bargaining. Collective bargaining typically involves unionized representatives negotiating formal agreements with employers under specific labor laws. Our approach at Contract Diagnostics focuses on organizing doctors around common goals to present unified requests to hospital management. This collaborative effort aims to align with hospital systems seeking to standardize contracts, not to replace physicians at the negotiation table. Our involvement brings expertise that can expedite results. If hospital employers prefer us not to be directly involved, we can still offer analysis and meeting preparatory expertise, helping physicians anticipate and prepare for their meetings.
“Working with Jon and his team was a professional and respectful process. Their team understood both parties’ wants and needs and was of great value in ensuring a reasonable agreement was reached.” – Nick
They won’t listen. They will not make adjustments.
We can’t get everyone on the same page.
They tell us they can’t pay us more.
We aren’t even getting numbers or reports.
The discussion is not always about ‘more’ compensation. It could involve transparency, benefits, schedules, staffing levels, technology, etc. If you are not getting numbers and transparency, our participation in the negotiations will help bring these concerns to the forefront and address them.
We don’t have good reimbursement or payors.
We are just a small community hospital.
We already make a lot of money.
The discussion is not always about ‘more’ compensation. It could involve transparency, benefits, schedules, staffing levels, technology, etc. Physicians make a lot of money by most standards, but it’s not just about the amount—it’s about being paid fairly for your role in your community with your skills. Your story matters, and fair compensation versus high earnings are two very different things.
Still have questions?
Ready to Transform Your Group’s Contract Negotiations?
Take the first step towards securing a group negotiation and ensure your team is at a Fair Market Value that genuinely reflects the value and dedication of your physician group. Our expert team is ready to guide you through every step of the negotiation process, ensuring you achieve the best possible terms.
Join the thousands of physicians who have benefited from our specialized negotiation services. This division of Contract Diagnostics is unprecedented and will impact group compensation and dynamics nationwide. Just like when Contract Diagnostics created the national contract review space over 13 years ago, we are again pioneering a new path forward to benefit the physicians we serve. Don’t settle for less—ensure your contracts are as outstanding as your medical practice.
Can’t wait? Contact us directly at 888-574-5526 or info@contractdiagnostics.com for immediate assistance.
Learn how to secure better contracts…
…higher salaries, and improved work-life balance – as a group