4 Unique Compensation Issues at Critical Access Hospitals

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There are roughly 1,327 critical access hospitals in the United States, and due to their unique classifications, compensation issues are not always cut-and-dried.

A recent article from Integrated Healthcare Strategies confronts some of those compensation issues for CAHs. Attracting talent is hard for many healthcare organizations, but it could be even harder for CAHs, which have less than 25 beds, are in generally rural areas and are normally more than 35 miles from the next closest hospital.

Here are four of the compensation issues CAHs face:

•    Multifaceted leadership roles. Larger hospitals and health systems have distinctly defined roles, but leaders at CAHs often serve many functions in many capacities in several areas throughout the organization.

•    Longer coverage. Many positions, such as lab and pharmacy, require 24/7 coverage regardless of workload and throughput due to their scarcity in the community.

•    Multiple modalities. Some positions are trained in several modalities, such as radiology, laboratory and therapy. Finding a compensation mark that accounts for that increased training is the hard part.

•    Benchmarking. CAHs have to wrestle with several compensation benchmarking questions. For example, CAH leaders have to determine if they should include larger nearby competitors when comparing employee pay, or they have to try to find benchmarking data of CAHs with similar demographics.

More Articles on Hospital Compensation:

California Bill Would Restrict Pay of Hospital District Executives

Capella Healthcare Executive Compensation Slightly Shifts Upward

48 Statistics on For-Profit Hospital Operator Executive Compensation

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