First, their fee-for-service structure: they have simplified it dramatically (they pared down the number of fee codes, increased their payment amounts, and made it very clear cut what to bill when, which we LOVE). They also pay an awesome hourly rate on top of this for administrative work (like charting and checking results) and provide significant overhead support payments. This is ground-breaking for Canada, because it recognizes that even if you are a fee-for-service physician, you have otherwise unpaid administrative time and overhead cost increases that aren’t in your control.

The second payment option is Canada’s ONLY reasonable and widely available SALARY model for family physicians (at least that we could find). We cannot commend PEI enough for this. It is a true salary, with paid vacation, a retirement package, WCB, sick leave, LTD, paid CME time off over and above vacation), and RRSP contributions. It is also a true salaried position in the sense that these physicians do not need to manage their office – they have all of their overhead, clinic management, and staffing financially and practically covered. They show up, do the work, and leave at the end of the day. These clinics come with a full compliment of allied health to work with, so that everyone can work to their full scopes.

This model is offered for both longitudinal family doctors and for those that provide family medicine specialty care. The caveats to this model is the number of patients you have to take on and the hours you have to commit to work (part time physicians who work a couple of days a week or have smaller panel sizes won’t have this as an option at this point). However, we feel that because PEI hasn’t been stingy in its alternative fee-for-service model, that there truly is something for every family physician in PEI.

PEI’s salary model would have likely ended it ranked number 1 overall, but because we used 800 patients as a calculation for our ranking, we couldn’t rank it as that panel size didn’t meet the cut off PEI needs to qualify for the salaried position. If PEI was having problems with recruiting enough family doctors in the coming years, they could re-look at this piece and offer salaries to lower-panelled physicians.

Finally, PEI, regardless of payment model, pays at the top end for continuing medical education support and parental leave and has a retention benefit lump sum split amongst all physicians in the province every year.
You’ve hit the mark exactly, PEI!