Information Powering Specialty Advocacy

The Challenge

Medical specialty societies wear many hats, which include serving as dedicated advocates for changes to rules or policies that unfairly or disproportionately impact the specialty. For example, changes to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule through wRVU reallocations and conversion factor reduction can significantly impact the availability of services and specialty practice. While close coordination between member practitioners, society leadership, and policy leaders generally suffices to produce the evidence necessary to carry an argument or appeal, certain efforts come up short where determinative data is simply not available.

The Strategy

Society members have been contacting society leadership for the last year expressing displeasure and frustration that the RVS Update Committee (RUC) failed to increase the relative value for certain core clinical activities. As a result, members’ professional services are valued less and will be reimbursed less again this year, and members’ compensation continues to fall. As the society’s Advocacy Director, you want to take up the cause but you are not sure how to substantiate your members’ position and know that anecdotal evidence alone will not prompt a change. You need a way to collect and analyze specific data available only from your members to advocate for the specialty.

The Selection

You recently read a study on gender pay disparity lead by a society in a related medical specialty. The results of the study were enlightening and completely supported by the methodology. How did that society collect such data and perform its analysis? You contact a colleague at that society and learn they recently had joined Phairify’s Partner Program and used Phairify’s web-based, specialty-specific, physician value study to collect and report up-to-date physician demographic and compensation data to develop their findings. You also learned that joining the Phairify Partner Program was free, as was study implementation, and all society members received immediate access to the data as a no-cost member benefit. After talking to Phairify, you understand that Phairify can construct any study to focus on the areas of greatest interest and need for each society.

Needing nothing else to make your decision, you recommend that your specialty society partner with Phairify and complete a physician value study. Upon conclusion of the study, the society was able to mine Phairify’s specialty-specific physician value database to generate a powerful report on statistically significant findings in order to advance your members’ position on RVU allocations and their impact on specialty compensation. The society was pleased with the information and the resulting increased persuasion of its advocacy efforts on this issue. You see Phairify’s information platform as an effective instrument for future advocacy and policy issues for your members.

With Phairify, this is the future of specialty society advocacy: carefully shaping and effectively supporting policy and practice positions of close interest to your members with a free, powerful information tool that you control. Phairify empowers society leaders to isolate, collect, and analyze the data they need to assess and articulate positions for their members, and the results are amazing.

Benefits & Results

• Data-informing decisions: Phairify allows the collection of up-to-date, specialty-specific compensation and productivity information, which can be used to inform important career decisions.
• Data–Specialty societies can increase their engagement with students and residents by communicating important information about their specialty’s trends in compensation and productivity.