Suman Radhakrishna, MD, FIDSA, FACP, is a practicing ID physician in Los Angeles, California, where she consults with patients at local community and tertiary care hospitals in downtown and East Los Angeles. She shared with Science Speaks how resources from IDSA’s Physician Compensation Initiative helped her successfully negotiate with hospitals on behalf of her small group practice, the Southern California Infectious Disease Medical Group.
Can you share some background on your ID group practice and where you are employed?
We are a small single specialty group with three physicians and another physician who works one weekend a month. We work across three community hospitals. In two hospitals, we are the only ID service in town, and in the third hospital, there is another ID group in addition to ours.
We have been providing consults and caring for patients at each hospital. One of the hospitals is a trauma center in downtown Los Angeles that serves a lot of unhoused people and undocumented individuals, many of whom either have Medicaid or are uninsured. Most of the ID groups don’t want to come to these hospitals because the payer profile is very poor.
Why did you decide to use resources from IDSA’s Physician Compensation Initiative?
We’re in a situation where we’re getting about 15 consults a day we have to triage. It’s a problem with burnout looming on the horizon. We decided we needed to start working smarter.
When IDSA came up with this initiative, I told myself I should hear them out. It’s been my experience that IDSA is more centric to academicians, not practitioners. My group partners, who are not IDSA members, weren’t convinced it would be worth our time. But I thought, well, what is it going to hurt? It’s free for members. So, I signed up for a one-on-one session with a compensation consultant when these sessions were available through IDSA’s Physician Compensation Initiative.
What information or advice did you receive during the session to help you navigate your situation?
I was pleasantly surprised to actually have somebody listen to what my issues were. For one, I was worried about where I was going to get local statistics to present, since we’re the only ID group in town who works in these hospitals. Another challenge is that most ID practices now are employed, so for most of them, all of this gets folded into their paycheck.
The expert suggested I use national statistics to point to the hospitals’ overall numbers for infection prevention and other relevant services, since our work directly contributes to success in those areas. He encouraged me to emphasize everything we bring to the table, such as heading up infection and prevention, chairing the antimicrobial stewardship program and securing the IDSA Antimicrobial Stewardship Center of Excellence designation. Basically, he shared input on how we could demonstrate to hospital administration that we’re responsible for maintaining the quality of ID care.
With this information, and using the pointers from the session, we went and spoke to the administration at all three hospitals to advocate for appropriate compensation.
What were the outcomes of your conversation with each hospital?
Two out of the three hospitals responded. One hospital came back with compensation numbers based on rates from their parent health system. While they didn’t acknowledge all the previous work we’d done without being compensated, since then they’ve made good on their agreement to pay us. The second hospital had a different payment structure that revolves around meeting certain metrics to receive a bonus at the end of the year. We started last year, and we’ve met the metrics, so now we’re waiting on the bonus check.
The third hospital acknowledged they should pay us. They haven’t paid us yet, but hope springs eternal, so I hope that they will come through and pay us.
Our total payment came out to be about $18,000 per year, per hospital. That was what we were leaving on the table. Is it going to make or break our bank? No, but it is definitely a welcome addition. Our group is grateful for this, and it did make a difference.
IDSA’s ID Physician Compensation Initiative provides compensation-related tools and negotiation strategy resources exclusively for members. Learn more about the initiative.
We want to hear about your experience with IDSA’s compensation resources! Email IDSA's Clinical Affairs team to learn more about how to share your story.