Documentation of physician compensation: A major determinant to maintaining compliance

Abstract

Non-compliance with regulatory requirements can bring significant risk, including considerable fines and penalties or exclusion from governmental healthcare programmes. Because of the potential consequences involved, healthcare leaders must mitigate compliance risk by clearly documenting and defining compliance programmes and physician arrangement parameters. These types of healthcare transactions and arrangements related to physician compensation require balancing the needs of the parties while also engaging in thorough and objective documentation and analysis. These considerations underscore the importance of comprehensive frameworks for evaluating physician arrangements and ensuring consistency, including policies related to monitoring and documentation. These needs are specifically important when assessing physician arrangements, including the requirements of fair market value and commercial reasonableness. This paper provides such a framework, identifies main areas for consideration, and provides insights to how to properly document principal factors surrounding healthcare transactions.