Compensating and providing incentives for academic physicians: balancing earning, clinical, research, teaching, and...

Providing a comprehensive compensation and incentive plan for a group of faculty members in a department with multiple goals provides a challenge that few administrators may take. Many academic departments have given up on implementing a comprehensive compensation and incentive plan since department goals generate competing uses of a faculty member's time. Whatever the plan design your department adopts, you can be sure that it will generate controversy. The JPN department has attempted to reward and encourage faculty members to pursue scholarly activities balanced with clinical activities. As a result, this strategy has only considered physicians who can generate both clinical income and research funding. Thus far, the JPN department faculty have embraced the plan. Long-term effects are not known as this is the first year of the plan. The measure of a successful total compensation program is one that develops a sense of entrepreneurship among its members to develop new clinical programs, to pursue new research collaborations, and to devise innovative methods of training. The program described in this article is not intended to serve as the ideal model for all departments, even in academic institutions, but rather to provide a strategy that may have applicability to many other departments where the goals induce inherent conflict for faculty members attempting to decide where to place their time commitments. In addition, this strategy does not work well on an individual basis for young, beginning faculty members but does work well in the collective--to promote the goals of the department. Be prepared, however, to modify your plan after a trial period of perhaps two years. You must allow time to monitor the effects of your compensation plan and its impact on the goals and direction of the department.