Neftali Serrano, CEO of CFHA, first approached me in late 2021 to design and distribute a salary survey to the integrated care workforce. I looked at my overloaded plate and thought, “This is too good to pass up”. So, I made room on the plate.

As an educator, I’ve been involved in workforce projects for several years. This was my first time collecting and analyzing compensation and workload survey data. After pitching and catching ideas with Neftali, I reviewed other survey examples and drafted one.

I circulated the draft to a few colleagues who gave tremendous feedback. From the beginning, I knew this survey would be a living document and evolve over time. The vision was to distribute the survey every two years and refine it every iteration.

Another goal was to make it accessible to the CFHA membership and public at-large (journal publications, presentations). There are compensation gaps in the field; a salary survey can start the conversation to address those gaps.

Colleagues in the field were also whispering to me that recruitment was difficult. Job positions were remaining empty for months on end. The integrated care field is not for everyone; but competitive, data-supported compensation packages and workload agreements can help human resource managers in their recruiting efforts.

From June 7^th to November 1^st in 2022, we surveyed members of the CFHA community using an electronic survey. 315 individuals participated. In addition to measuring compensation, we collected information on job descriptions, workloads, location, education, licensure, billing, practice type, patient population, and job satisfaction.

This slide deck is available to the public and reviews the main findings. Our  future goal is to look deeper at trends and relationships in the dataset. We are working on manuscripts to share these results and an interactive map that allows zooming in on state-level results. Progress will be a little slow as we work on these deliverables. Over time, we should become more adept at reporting future results.

Check out the latest CFHA Podcast episode that reviews compensation in the field.

Here are a few takeaways:

• Most respondents are working in primary care, treating “cradle to grave” populations (entire lifespan), and working full-time.
• Most are white, female, with a doctoral-level degree.
• Most do not have any on-call responsibility and about half work remotely.
• 44% strongly agree with “I am satisfied working as a BHP” and “I plan to stay at my current employment for at least the next two years”.
• 2% strongly agree with “I experience very little stress at work”.

I am not sharing any compensation or workload results here because I want to further examine that data. There were multiple participants who see patients in addition to administration, education, evaluation, or other non-clinical duties. We need to sift these out to clearly identify those with a fuller clinical workload. We also need comparison data to place our results in the larger workforce context.

Workforce is the life blood of the integrated care movement. We need professionals who are adequately compensated and assigned reasonable workloads. My goal is to track these results over time to see how these indicators change over time and how they influence quality of work/life measures. Stay tuned for more.