Salary for Supervising

Question: I have a side job as the medical supervisor of a college health clinic. I spend three hours a week on site seeing patients, and I supervise three nurse practitioners. Each sees 15 to 20 patients a day. What do you think is fair compensation for this work?

Answer: There are several ways to look at your compensation:

1) Base it on the relative value units (RVUs) you produce. You’d take a baseline salary, and then you’d pick up a bonus if you exceeded a certain productivity benchmark each quarter.

2) Calculate what your full-time salary would be at your other positions, and extrapolate a percentage from there.

3) Given that supervising the NPs takes away from your ability to devote time to patient care and your own productivity, it’s worth arguing that you need some compensation for that, too. You can name a price based on an hourly rate (figured by taking what you get paid per hour for clinical work and then charging some percentage of that for your supervisory work). You could also set a flat fee (determined by what you feel makes the work worth it to you, basically). Or you can base your fee on a percentage of the revenue the NPs generate. The last is the least risky for the employer, since if you can make the NPs more productive, you all win.