By Dr. Jim Dahle, WCI Founder
The White Coat Investor has had an advertising relationship/partnership with Resolve for years. Resolve is a company that reviews physician contracts, provides data to physicians, and negotiates on your behalf as desired. One of its paid services is what it calls “Instant,” where Resolve gives you information like the MGMA data for your specialty and area. It also offers two free “widgets” for initial comparisons of both salary and contracts. You don't even have to go to the Resolve website to see what it can do. Hop on over to the WCI physician contract review page, and you can input your data there to see what kind of helpful information you can find.
Physician Salary Comparison Widget
The first widget is simply a salary comparison widget. Like with most things in life, you get what you pay for. The first option is totally free, and it does not require an email address. It looks like this:
As you can see, you are allowed to select your specialty (EM in my case), and you get to see the base salary and signing/relocation bonus from up to three contracts that emergency physicians have actually been offered recently. In this case, the data shows salaries from $331,000-$374,000 and bonuses from $0-$75,000. While this isn't terribly useful for a residency-graduating job seeker, perhaps it might be helpful for a medical student trying to get a general idea of what the various specialties might actually pay. You can obviously get more data by paying the $199 fee for the “Instant” service.
More information here:
How Much Money Do Doctors Make a Year? Salaries Rise (Slightly)
28 Things You Can Negotiate Besides Salary
Physician Contract Scorecard
The other cool widget is the contract comparison tool. Again, you get what you pay for. If you're not willing to give an email address to sign up, then all you get is this:
It rates your total compensation as “needs negotiating,” “average,” or “satisfactory,” i.e. above average. Signing up for the free account gets you a much more robust version of the Contract Scorecard. You put in the details in your contract, and you can see how 11 items in your contract compare to the contracts in the database.
You can use just one of them or all of them if you like.
I thought that would be pretty useful if, for some reason, you decided to cheap out and not pay for a formal contract review. Frankly, I think pretty much all docs should pay a few hundred bucks and get their contracts formally reviewed before signing them. But at least this way, you can do a bit of comparing to other real life contracts out there.
What do you think? What other free resources for contract information are you aware of?
They require NPI at signup FYI
As mentioned in the post, that’s hardly something you should be hesitant to provide given its availability with a simple google search. It’s not some sort of private number.
Is there any way for students without NPI numbers to sign up?
Great question. I’ll pass that concern on to them to see what they’re able/willing to do.
I’m told if you just put in 1111111111 it’ll go through.
Is there no free access anymore? Just tried this and unfortunately doesn’t give much data without the “Instant access”
I don’t think anything has changed. You get a little data providing nothing, more giving your email address, and even more if you pay for the service.
Sorry to bother, Dr. Dahle,
But I tried signing up with my email and I don’t get any more data. For my specialty, it just shows 5 contracts, I can’t filter by any criteria, and I can’t see more than the first 5…There is no “data service” option any more, it instead has “instant”, “basic”, “standard”, and “premium” for $199 up to $1999. Am I missing something here? I would like to at least get the email-level data…
Thank you!
I’ll email you and we’ll see if we can fix it with a little help from my staff.
Resolve has changed their packages to “instant”, “basic”, “standard”, and “premium” and has more limited free data. The post has been updated to reflect that.