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In the past few years, unfortunately I've heard from former residents who felt as if they were getting screwed or treated unfairly by their employers. Some of these doctors started with high salaries and some started with fair offers. But there has been a recurrent theme, and that is the fact that many feel promises made during employment have not been kept.
A few words of advice:
-if your employer is crying the blues that money has been tight due to debt, low reimbursements, high overhead or whatever reason, that is the employers problem, not yours. If your pay has been capped or even decreased (they will often say the reason is to be able to keep you on board), ask if the other employees or office manager have had pay capped or decreased. The answer is always "no". Once again, your employer's financial woes are not YOUR financial woes. If they are asking you to take a cut or be capped at your current salary because things aren't good, ask yourself if your employer would give you more money or a bonus of things WERE good. Chances are you already know that answer.
-do your homework and find out how many associates have been through those doors prior to you. If none are still there or none have ever been made a partner......run in the other direction. I assure you the employer will tell you the prior associate didn't work hard, the former associate was lazy, the former associate had family in another area, the former associate had a spouse who got a job out of the area and so on and so on. I guarantee you, it wasn't always the fault of the associate. Once or twice maybe, but if a pattern has been set, that should raise a red flag. In that case, buyer beware.
-many associates are reimbursed on a percentage basis or are bonused on a percentage basis. Then the associate realizes he or she is seeing all the poor paying plans, plans that don't reimburse for X-rays, etc. The associate often ends up dispensing orthoses that were made by the partner (usually a freebie visit), seeing some no charge post op patients and similar situations. So in plain English, the associate gets dumped on. I'm not saying this is always the case, but keep your eyes open.
-the employer will hand the associate a contract and say "don't waste your money having it looked over by an attorney, because we won't make ANY changes, so if you don't sign it as is, we can't hire you". I hear this often, and that's the sign of an unreasonable employer.
-if an associate is being paid via percentage or bonus, find out IF and HOW you can access your production at ANY time. Most, if not all EMR systems will allow you to track the amount billed and amount received for every doctor for any given time frame, and/or any individual procedure code. If the employer denies access to this information, that's another red flag. Also make sure you are getting credit for patients you've seen. Ask the billing staff to randomly pull up a few patients you've seen to assure you're getting credit.
There are many more issues I hear regularly, but these are the most frequent. Please move ahead with caution and never sign anything without having it reviewed by an attorney. Never.
A few words of advice:
-if your employer is crying the blues that money has been tight due to debt, low reimbursements, high overhead or whatever reason, that is the employers problem, not yours. If your pay has been capped or even decreased (they will often say the reason is to be able to keep you on board), ask if the other employees or office manager have had pay capped or decreased. The answer is always "no". Once again, your employer's financial woes are not YOUR financial woes. If they are asking you to take a cut or be capped at your current salary because things aren't good, ask yourself if your employer would give you more money or a bonus of things WERE good. Chances are you already know that answer.
-do your homework and find out how many associates have been through those doors prior to you. If none are still there or none have ever been made a partner......run in the other direction. I assure you the employer will tell you the prior associate didn't work hard, the former associate was lazy, the former associate had family in another area, the former associate had a spouse who got a job out of the area and so on and so on. I guarantee you, it wasn't always the fault of the associate. Once or twice maybe, but if a pattern has been set, that should raise a red flag. In that case, buyer beware.
-many associates are reimbursed on a percentage basis or are bonused on a percentage basis. Then the associate realizes he or she is seeing all the poor paying plans, plans that don't reimburse for X-rays, etc. The associate often ends up dispensing orthoses that were made by the partner (usually a freebie visit), seeing some no charge post op patients and similar situations. So in plain English, the associate gets dumped on. I'm not saying this is always the case, but keep your eyes open.
-the employer will hand the associate a contract and say "don't waste your money having it looked over by an attorney, because we won't make ANY changes, so if you don't sign it as is, we can't hire you". I hear this often, and that's the sign of an unreasonable employer.
-if an associate is being paid via percentage or bonus, find out IF and HOW you can access your production at ANY time. Most, if not all EMR systems will allow you to track the amount billed and amount received for every doctor for any given time frame, and/or any individual procedure code. If the employer denies access to this information, that's another red flag. Also make sure you are getting credit for patients you've seen. Ask the billing staff to randomly pull up a few patients you've seen to assure you're getting credit.
There are many more issues I hear regularly, but these are the most frequent. Please move ahead with caution and never sign anything without having it reviewed by an attorney. Never.
