Are you interested in clinic work or hospitalist work?
If the latter, here's my midwestern-area schedule, hours, pay. I'd say in terms of all of these factors it is median for the area. Cut off 25%+ if you're looking at the coasts. This post is mainly to offer a look at how some of the less-traditional schedules work, since 7-on-7-off 12 hours shifts are pretty self explanatory.
SHIFTS: I work 16-18 shifts per month as part of a group of 9. Of these, 3-5 a month are nights. We do NOT have a 7-on-7-off schedule. I might be working 7 days straight, or 10, or occasionally more. (I prefer longer stretches because the first and last days of service are a pain. Don't underestimate how much faster and more fun it is to have the momentum of your own plans in place.)
WORKFLOW: I get into work between 6-7AM. I work fast, taking between 10-20 minutes for any given floor patient and 35-80 minutes for a stable ICU patient. I'm usually done seeing patients by noon at the latest.
Every day, I will pick up enough patients from overnight to try to even out the census among the four of us who are on during the day. During the day I will be either rounding (not picking up patients at all), or on call from 7-10, 10-2, or 2-5. I usually get between 0 and 4 patients on a call.
My census ranges from 4-18ish and I usually see around 12 patients a day.
I get home by 1PM on light days, and by 6PM on heavier days. We cover our own pages until 10PM, so I'm still on call until then. This is an unusual set-up but I am happy to take extra pager time for the flexibility of leaving the hospital whenever my work is done.
PAY: My base salary is 200k, with 20k of usually-met quality incentives that kick in after the first year and a production bonus that would probably add an average of 10k over the course of a year.
MISC: I'd estimate that I'm actually working between 40-50 hours a week on average. My partners probably average a bit more. I feel I was helped by training at a high-volume program with lots of sick patients. This sort of training gets you in the habit of cutting out the fat. Once you get comfortable working quickly through 20 patients as a resident, it will be wonderful fun to see how much easier things get done when you can make decisions without going through bedside presentations every morning.
