Jim Oates, MD, a current member of the ACR Board of Directors and past chair of the Division Directors Committee, concurs with the encouragement for all members from the practice and academic communities to respond to the survey. He says the Academic Benchmark survey has proved useful to faculty in negotiating contracts and understanding their benchmarks compared with colleagues in similar institutions and geographic locations.
The data generated will only be as useful as the input received, and the more responses received, the more robust the results will be. “The rheumatology community as a whole will benefit if as many members as possible take time to fill out the survey,” Dr. Phillips adds.
How to Use Benchmark Survey Findings
Once responses are collected, the ACR will generate a comprehensive report that will be made available to members online. “For the ACR, survey findings will help identify the needs of members, including what they are struggling with, where advocacy efforts need to be addressed and what we can do better to help practices succeed,” says Dr. Phillips.
Additionally, members will have a valuable benchmarking tool to understand how they are performing relative to their peers and to guide them in the business decisions that will maintain their economic viability. As a rheumatology small business owner, Dr. Phillips looks forward to seeing how his metrics such as patient wait time and overhead compare to those of his peers in order to gain insight into what he can do better. “It’s so helpful to the health of the practice to keep a finger on the pulse of where the field is going business-wise, and I see this as one of the ways to do that.”
Carina Stanton is a freelance science journalist based in Denver.
