How Physicians Benefit from Rural Practice
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Being a physician is a challenging profession. Not only do you have to deal with life or death situations, but you must also juggle a mountain of rules and regulations, often-aggravating EHR systems, heavy patient loads and long hours. While verbal expressions of appreciation are always welcome, it’s easy to understand why most physicians look to their salary and benefits for proof that their employers truly value their skills.
If you’re among them, we have some good news: physician salaries are continuing to increase.
According to Medscape’s 2017 Physician Compensation Report, the average income for physicians has risen steadily over the last six years, increasing from $206,000 in 2011 to $294,000 in 2017.
Choose a Rural Area for Even Higher Salaries
While the Medscape survey revealed that specialists continue to earn more than primary care physicians — 45.6 percent more, in fact — you can score higher pay regardless of your chosen discipline if you work in a geographic area where demand is greater. This includes the rural portions of America’s Midwest and Great Plains. Medscape found that the average physician income in the northern Great Plains is $317,000 in 2017. It’s $303,000 in the Great Lakes states.
When they looked at the data by state, Medscape found that physicians also reported the highest earnings in those with small cities and vast rural landscapes. For 2017, the states with the highest average physician salaries are North Dakota ($361,000), South Dakota ($354,000), Nebraska ($346,000), New Hampshire ($337,000) and Alaska ($259,000).
The survey authors postulated that these states have a lower homegrown supply of physicians, which is likely contributing to the need for employers to offer higher salaries to doctors willing to relocate. Per Medscape, Alaska lacks any medical schools, and North Dakota, South Dakota and New Hampshire only have one medical school each.
More Benefits of Rural Practice
While choosing to practice in a rural area may mean you have to give up some of the amenities common in bigger cities, recruiters are quick to stress that there are many benefits — in addition to higher pay — that come with small town life.
“In bigger cities, you have all the metropolitan amenities, but you also have a ton of competition, traffic, higher crime rates and higher costs of living,” says K.C. Fleming, medical staff recruiter at Great River Health Systems in West Burlington, Iowa.
He works hard to change potential employees’ perceptions of rural practice, and adds “Once we are able to get someone on the phone, or better yet, in town for a visit, we can share our story. We may not have as much shopping, dining or cultural type of activities [as a larger town], but we have 90 percent of the rest of what you need. And no traffic, low cost of living, safe communities, great schools and maybe most importantly, tons of patients who are eager to meet their new physician.”
In its study of the best and worst states for physicians, WalletHub (a company that offers free credit reports, scores and monitoring) analyzed some of these factors. They evaluated physician opportunity and competition as well as medical environment using 14 relevant metrics that included average annual wage, average monthly starting salary, hospitals per capita, insured population rate, primary care provider shortage, current competition, quality of public hospital system, punitiveness of state medical board and malpractice award payout amount per capita.
The resulting list of 10 best states for physicians corroborated the results of the Medscape survey, highlighting additional states in the Midwest and Great Plains regions. Iowa topped the ranking, followed by Minnesota, Idaho, Wisconsin, Kansas, South Dakota, Montana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.
Hospitals and other medical facilities in these states — including Fleming’s employer, Great River Health Systems — are eager to attract motivated physicians who want to take advantage of the aforementioned benefits a rural lifestyle can offer as well as the opportunity to earn some of the nation’s highest physician wages.
“We offer a production-based pay model that allows our physicians to be high earners if they choose,” Fleming concludes. “Since we don’t have much, if any, local competition in our marketplace, our physicians can usually be as busy as they want to be. If you want to be a median level earner and have a great work/life balance, coaching your kids’ soccer team for example, we can offer that. On the other hand, if you want to work hard, provide good care and be efficient, you’ll be as busy as you’d like and can many times earn at or beyond the 90th percentile.”
Search for Rural Physician Opportunities
Whether you judge potential jobs by pay alone or consider lifestyle and other factors when evaluating opportunities, you’ll find hundreds of rural healthcare employers recruiting new doctors. Sign up for a free account today, upload your resume and set up job alerts for high-paying Midwest and Great Plains locations.
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