Methods of general practitioners remuneration in the world: A benchmarking study

Due to strong spiritual and humanity atmosphere of medical profession, from more than two decades, the Iranian Medical Community has been wishful to approving a logical and evidence based system to general practitioners (GPs) remuneration. GPs remuneration Method has meaningful effects on health expenditures. The aim of this study was to benchmark methods of GPs remuneration in the world.

using keywords including: remuneration, payment, pay, general practitioner, medical doctor, general physicians, consultation, family physician, gatekeeping, private sector, health expenditure, sessional, pay for performance, income, salary, capitation, fee-for-service, wage, compensation and name of the selected countries, and also visit the websites of health and economics of each countries, the existing documents were extracted and reviewed. Then we combined the extracted information each other.

we reviewed 261 documents on methods of GPs remuneration from 36 countries around the world. Dominant methods of physician remuneration were fixed salary, fee-for-service, capitation and pay per performance or a combination of these methods. A fixed salary is common as a part of doctors’ fee in most of selected countries. Payment method has a serious impact on physician performance. Purchasing power is used for comparison of the income level of doctors inter and intra- countries.

It seems today, using a combination of all methods mentioned above in a managed way is the implicit agreement. Combined remuneration methods combine the incentives of all its components. The hybrid approaches allow serious flexibility in different regional circumstances.