MDNews - Long Island

"There are downsides," Mosley says. "[Employed physicians] are no longer in charge. They have to be fl exible. Doctors who become employed have also said that there is more paperwork to do than when they were independent." Resources such as the American Medical Association's "Principles for Physician Employment" offer guidance on creating mutually benefi cial agreements between physicians and employers. That is a topic of ceaseless conversation on the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons' Practice Management Committee, says Charles Goldfarb, MD, Vice Chair of Orthopedic Surgery at St. Louis Children's Hospital and a member of the committee. While Dr. Goldfarb says employment has not lessened the demands his own career makes on his time, he believes it can create a path to greater work- life balance and allow physicians to leverage the fi nancial and technological expertise of larger organizations. That includes issues such as better controlling work hours and relying on hospitals' IT infrastructure to collect essential data on patient outcomes. What the Future Holds While the number of employed physicians remains high, those numbers are no longer growing at the rapid rates of previous years, according to Mosley. "In our 2013–2014 survey, 64 percent of the physicians [chose] hospital employment, and that was the same as the year before," he explains. "I don't think it will ever become 100 percent employed. It's a trend, and trends go up and down. You'll still have some entrepreneurs. Maybe [under] a new delivery model that comes along … [it] will be more cost-effi cient to be independent." In short, employment offers benefi ts to physicians, but the quest continues for a practice model that maintains physician autonomy while boosting quality of life and reining in the bureaucracy with which physicians must contend. Alternatives — including hybrids of existing models — have appeared in recent years and continue to gel. They include medical partnerships among several independent practitioners, concierge practices with less complex business models, and physician enterprise leases that allow physicians to remain independent but lean on the technological and business acumen of larger healthcare organizations. The employed-physician model may even be reaching a satura- tion point, as physicians think through its implications and test other, potentially better options, Mosley says. Their penchant for independent thinking, applied to a challenging healthcare environment, makes this moment in medicine anything but dull. "The good news about medicine is it changes daily," Mosley says. "It's interesting to be in this fi eld." ■ S T R ES S R ELI EF Fifty-eight percent of employed physicians cited not having to deal with running a practice as the top perk of their position, according to a 2014 Medscape survey. M D N E W S . CO M ■ MD NEWS Long Island | 2 9

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