Are you paying your PA staff what they deserve?

Healthcare Financial Management, Annual, 2004 by Stacy Calvaruso

Patient access (PA) personnel often are the first people a patient encounters in a hospital. This encounter can have a significant effect on the patient's perception of the organization--a good impression can go a long way toward building patient loyalty. A bad impression, however, can result in a lost customer.

For this reason, PA staff members need to be highly skilled in customer service and well motivated to perform their duties with energy and commitment. To retain truly qualified and enthusiastic PA personnel, a hospital must be willing to compensate these individuals appropriately for their services.

If you are struggling with justifying the salary levels you know your PA staff members deserve, then you may want to consider performing salary surveys based on other industry standards for customer-service professionals. Consider, for example, the case of one hospital that was having trouble locating and maintaining a qualified PA staff. An evaluation of the hospital's benchmarks for setting salary levels disclosed that the hospital was basing its salaries only on those offered by other local hospitals and physician practices.

An "out-of-the-box" salary survey found that, compared with qualified individuals from other industries, the hospital's PA employees were grossly underpaid--starting out at about $2.00 less per hour than other customer-service personnel. It was evident that these salary levels were undermining the organization's ability to attract the most qualified candidates, even though those individuals might not have any PA experience. What the best candidates lacked in experience with health care, they more than made up for with training and broad experience in customer service--attributes that are highly valued in most industries.

To make a case for raising PA staff compensation, the skill-set and scope-of-work requirements for PA personnel were compared with those for 24-hour customer-service staff in other industries. This analysis revealed that hospital PA employees actually had many more critical job duties affecting the entire organization than customer-service employees in other industries. These findings were sufficiently compelling to convince the hospital's administration that a salary scale change was warranted. Once the salary scales were changed, the talent pool opened, and the hospital was able to quickly hire dependable, qualified individuals, which stabilized this key area of the revenue cycle for this organization.

HOURLY COMPENSATION LEVELS FOR VARIOUS CUSTOMER-SERVICE POSITIONS

                                                              Low $

Customer-Service Representative for Cablevision Service       14.78

Bank Teller/Account Clerk                                     11.39

Billing Clerk (nonhealthcare related)                         13.49

Travel Agent                                                  10.79

                                                              Mid $

Customer-Service Representative for Cablevision Service       17.06

Bank Teller/Account Clerk                                     13.02

Billing Clerk (nonhealthcare related)                         14.95

Travel Agent                                                  11.54

                                                             High $

Customer-Service Representative for Cablevision Service       18.93

Bank Teller/Account Clerk                                     14.65

Billing Clerk (nonhealthcare related)                         17.49

Travel Agent                                                  13.07

Stacy Calvaruso is CEO, CalMed Consulting, Inc., Prairieville, La., and a member of HFMA's Louisiana Chapter.

Send your questions or comments to Stacy Calvaruso at stacy@calmedconsulting.com.