Becker's ASC Review

16 ASC MANAGEMENT Where physician pay is falling By Riz Hatton M any physicians have expressed dissatisfaction with their income in light of inflation and CMS pay cuts. However, some specialties have seen a sharper drop in pay than others. This data was pulled from Physicians Thrive's 2022 Physician Compensation Report and Merritt Hawkins and AMN Healthcare's 2022 "Review of Physician and Advanced Practitioner Recruiting Incentives" reports. Here are five specialties where physicians pay is declining: 1. Primary care physicians earned an average of $242,000 in 2021, down from $243,000 in 2020. 2. The average starting salary for interventional cardiologists in 2022 was $527,000, down from $611,000 in 2021. 3. The average starting salary for hematologists in 2022 was $404,000, down from $426,000 in 2021. 4. The average starting salary for radiologists in 2022 was $455,000, down from $465,000 in 2021. 5. The average starting salary for pediatricians in 2022 was $232,000, down from $236,000 in 2021. n Here's where physicians are investing in 2023 By Patsy Newitt Five physicians joined Becker's to give their biggest investment tips for 2023. Question: What are your key investment tips for 2023? Editor's note: ese responses were edited lightly for clarity and brevity. Tirun Gopal, MD. OB-GYN in San Francisco: 1. Any organization which moves healthcare to the home (RomTech, for example). 2. Organizations which are promoting primary care (Amazon). 3. Artificial intelligence (cautiously, for obvious reasons). 4. Organizations which are increasingly promoting value for care instead of volume of care. 5. IT in healthcare. Harry Severance, MD. Adjunct Assistant Professor at Duke University School of Medicine (Durham, N.C.): A.I.-assisted or -enabled medical technology. Matthew Smith, MD. Director of Neurocritical Care at West Virginia University (Morgantown): Philosophically, the best return on investment is to increase skills. e world of medicine is significantly changing at a very rapid pace with things like increases in computing power and AI, as well as how medicine is practiced. Many people unwilling to focus on improving and updating their skills will be le behind like the carriage drivers when cars became popular. Helga Komen, MD. Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Washington University (St. Louis): Sustainability-related companies and AI-related companies. Michael Davis, MD. Professor and Chief of the Division of Urology at University of New Mexico (Albuquerque): My key investment tips would be all of the companies contributing to AI like Microso, Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta. ey also have the cloud, which is huge. So, I still think as AI gets better, these companies, especially Microso, that has invested billions in Open AI will be a good investment. n Physician-led ASC planned in Wisconsin By Paige Haeffele C onstruction is set to begin on an independent, surgeon-led ASC in Jamestown, Wis., the Telegraph Herald reported May 1. Ten independent surgeons from four practices in Dubuque, Iowa, which is just 10 minutes from Jamestown — Dubuque Podiatry, Dubuque Surgery, Dubuque Orthopaedic Surgeons and Dubuque ENT Head & Neck Surgery — will run the center, according to the publication. Many of the surgeons involved in the planned Upper Mississippi Surgery Center practice out of UnityPoint Health-Finley Hospital, also in Dubuque, and will continue to do so for surgeries requiring overnight stays or for patients with multiple comorbidities, according to the Telegraph Herald. Construction is set to begin early May and will take about a year and a half to be fully operational, the publication said. It is estimated the center will see 2,500 patients each year. "This is where healthcare is going," Jacob Wagner, MD, PhD, a general surgeon involved with the center, told the Telegraph Herald. "Medicare and Medicaid and all the other big insurers would like to see more [operations] done in surgery centers, so [this project] is addressing a need for those centers in the community." n

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