Jamaal Campbell, Hallmark’s new General Manager of the Provider Enablement line of business, has spent years advising health systems nationwide. And from that experience, he knows that healthcare compensation teams are poised to lead on strategy. They have the potential to guide compensation design, physician recruiting and retention, and compliance and help boost the bottom line. But to be truly strategic, comp teams need the right tools to lift them out of spreadsheets and into the big picture.
We spoke with Jamaal about how tech can transform a comp team and we got some of his insights into the changing landscape of physician compensation and recruitment, the future of locums, and what he’s most excited about here at Hallmark.
You’ve advised a lot of physician compensation teams. Can you tell us about the role they play, and how different it can be when they have the right tools in place?
When you talk about a compensation team truly operating at “top of license,” I think it really needs space and support to be strategic in how it responds to internal and external market dynamics. If you’re a physician enterprise, your largest expense is provider compensation. As a result, you want to make sure you’re managing it well. You need to be very thoughtful about compensation models and make sure you have the right mix of providers and specialties.
But because of the manual processes in place today across most organizations, their day-to-day is truly blocking and tackling. The manual workflows and sheer number of handoffs necessary in an environment with limited technology, it is typically frustrating for the team. It always appears there is a never-ending backlog. Even at the VP level, compensation professionals rarely have the time to think strategically about the direction of provider compensation and how it intersects with the more comprehensive organizational strategy.
Another challenge is the lack of standardization for compensation plans. Even if you bring in technology to replace the manual processing workflows, if every comp plan is a one-off, it’s still too time-consuming and difficult to take a strategic approach. And that’s what’s behind one of the big shifts I’m seeing now. Healthcare organizations are standardizing comp instead of trying to track so many variations and permutations.
So, what could comp teams be doing if they had technology to streamline processes along with standardized compensation models? First, manual processes would stop being a bottleneck, and compensation leaders could really help drive the business operationally, financially, and strategically. And the analysts (the people who love to be deep into the numbers) could do the kind of analysis that really supports a team’s success.
Compensation teams have been working with their old, manual processes for a long time. Why change now?
Nationally, healthcare organizations are really feeling financial pressure. Labor expenses are nearing $900 billion industry wide, accounting for 56% of total costs.1 The margins are razor thin, and I think you’re going to see a lot more consolidation as we move forward. As physician enterprises continue to grow, comp teams are going to need to manage an influx of new providers. Your first thought might be to just hire an army of analysts to manage a larger pool of physicians. But those professionals are hard to find. Then add the geographical complexity that has become necessary today to even staff up to desired levels. Now you can have a health system in Florida employing someone on their comp team who lives in Seattle. The competition for top talent in this space is fierce! To make it work, you have to leverage technology. You do have to become more efficient.
Where are most healthcare organizations, in terms of technology, today? And what will the switch to new compensation technology look like?
From my experience, I think about 75-80 percent of compensation teams are still working in Excel and/or Access for management of their plans. But I’ve seen a big shift in the last couple of years. Organizations are realizing it’s not about if they’ll adopt new technology, it’s when. Everyone is saying they’ve got to move in this direction.
We’ve talked about time, but there’s another reason tech is so important. In organizations that track their compensation error rates, the average is about three to five percent. And that’s just what they know. I would guess that most of the time the error rates are at least double that—and that’s a significant expense that goes unnoticed.
The errors generally happen because of manual handoffs and information sometimes coming from disparate sources. I send information in an e-mail to this person, who then forwards it to this person, and then that gets entered into a specific system. Then I have to take that and enter it into another system which then drives payroll calculations. There are a lot of opportunities for errors all along the way. The right technology can reduce all of that.
These manual processes also make it hard to track errors. You just don’t have the insight you need. But the right technology can flag a potential issue. The technology can tell me, “Hey, this provider seems to be trending significantly above where they were last month. Let’s make sure everything is correct.”
A manual system is also vulnerable to compliance risks. And you can find yourself in a situation where no one knows where the information is or what’s going on. What are the right contact details and payment rates, and have the data sources been validated? Additionally, everything might be living on someone’s desktop in a model they’ve been running and tinkering with and building for years. Beyond concerns in the ability to support the organization’s compliance framework, if that person leaves, there’s no one left who understands the system.
You’ve explained how the right technology helps prevent errors while freeing up the comp team’s time to be more strategic and one area where healthcare organizations really need to be strategic is recruiting. What do comp teams need to know?
For one thing, when you’re a doctor just out of med school, you want compensation to be simple and easy to understand. If there’s, say, a two-year compensation guarantee, you want to know what happens next. Transparency really matters. And using the right technology can help comp teams offer more transparency to doctors.
Comp teams also need to think strategically about locums. We’re seeing a shift as this generation asks themselves, “How much do I want my career to control my life?” Anecdotally, we know there is significant number of physicians choosing to move into the locum space for flexibility and lifestyle reasons. It’s a huge change in the market and puts increased coverage and financial pressure on the physician enterprise. Additionally, from an operational perspective, many organizations do not have a true understanding of whether they are getting appropriate value out of their contingent providers.
We’re not going to get away from locums because it’s cost-prohibitive to have every one of your providers as an employee, so healthcare systems need technology, like Hallmark’s solution, that lets them evaluate and review how they’re using contingent providers so they can be strategic about how to deploy them.
You’ve just joined Hallmark and we’re thrilled to have you here! What are you focused on right now?
I’m really excited about Hallmark’s updated app for providers because it’s such a critical tool for provider engagement. Transparency is so important for engagement. After all, clinicians are scientists, so it’s in their nature to be very data driven. They want to be able to quickly go into their app and see all the details, from how compensation and performance are trending to key elements of their contracts being readily available at their fingertips. Additionally, I’m also excited about our push into the AI space and leveraging language and machine learning to further assist our clients better optimizing the compensation function.
Overall, I’m concentrating on the ways Hallmark’s Workforce Enablement and Intelligence tools can elevate compensation teams out of their Excel spreadsheets and free up capacity for them to have more time to focus on strategic priorities and ensure broader alignment with key organizational initiatives.
If you’d like to know more about Hallmark’s healthcare-native Workforce Intelligence and Enablement platform, reach out to us for a demo.