Value and Compensation: Key Takeaways From Cardiovascular Summit

Friday, February 25, 2022 | Joel Sauer

This past week, ACC hosted its annual Cardiovascular Summit, “where quality and finance intersect!” There were tons of great topics with equally great speakers. I’m excited to share some of the highlights and things that I learned with the MedAxiom community – just a tiny snippet of the expert insights that were shared. 

Take Away #1: Value and compensation were recurring themes throughout the conference. We tend to get what we value and compensate, and what we don’t compensate we should expect to be ignored. In general, cardiology income will be lower in situations where the physicians are not at risk for the total cost of care. 

Take away #2: Care teams are incredibly valuable and go far beyond physicians and advanced practice providers. The care team needs to include pharmacy, dietary, social work, nurses, medical assistants and more. To use the care team effectively and safely, standards are a requisite.

Take away #3: While there will likely be a rebalance of cardiologists out of hospital employment back to private groups, it is not expected to go back to the levels seen in the early 2000s. This transition is not easy and takes a lot of money. According to MedAxiom data, currently 87% of cardiologists are integrated with a hospital or health system. A panel of experts at the Summit thought this might slide back to 50% or 60% over the coming decade and private equity will certainly play a role.

Take away #4: Looking ahead we can count on continued declines in reimbursement per unit for our services. This means that we’ll need to be both nimble and innovative to thrive. There are many new and old players outside traditional providers trying to disrupt our world. The more providers are willing to bear risk on total cost of care, the more financial returns will be available to us. 

Take away #5: CTA will continue to grow in its prevalence and clinical importance in cardiovascular care but is not an “only” strategy. While we will certainly be doing better revascularization because of CTA, whether we will be doing more or less is yet to be seen.

We look forward to continuing the momentum and insightful conversations from ACC’s Cardiovascular Summit during CV Transforum Spring’22, hosted by MedAxiom April 21-23 in Atlanta. Explore sessions covering financial, operational and strategic challenges facing our community and register today.

Illustration: Lee Sauer

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