Be smart about projected hours of work

The number of annual hours you submit in the “Clinical Working Time” section will determine the hourly portion of your biweekly payments. You will be asked to project how many clinical hours you will work annually. Once you sign this document, that number becomes your contracted hours. Every two weeks, the DHW will pay you for those hours, plus another 10% for your clinical support service time and any complexity modifier for your place of practice.

You will submit your actual hours worked on a regular basis (see page 8) and your submitted (actual) hours will be reconciled with your contracted hours annually, after the end of the fiscal year (March 31). If your submitted hours exceed your contracted hours, you will be paid the difference, but if your submitted hours are less than your contracted hours, you will have to pay back the difference.

To avoid facing a claw back at the end of the year, consider submitting a slightly lower number of projected hours than you intend to work when filling out Schedule A. Here are some additional ideas to consider.

Statutory holidays

If you do not typically work statutory holidays, consider deducting those hours from your annual contracted hours up front. You won’t be paid for them; therefore, they won’t have to be part of your six weeks of uncontracted time and you will not have to make up the hours elsewhere.

For example:

If you typically work 40 hours per week over 46 weeks, you would be contracted to work 1,840 hours annually. MSI recognizes 14 statutory holidays in 2024. If you typically work an eight-hour day, subtract 112 hours from 1,840 to get 1,728 hours for your contracted annual hours. This is the equivalent of “banking” another 14 days of uncontracted time. You will still work your 40-hour work week on the weeks there are no statutory holidays. If you were to work a statutory holiday, you would submit premium hours for that time and be paid for those hours at the end of the year following the annual hours reconciliation. Similarly, if the stat holiday falls on a weekend or a day you wouldn’t typically work, you will have submitted more hours worked than you were paid for that week and it will be reconciled at the end of the year. This ensures you are not paid upfront for the statutory holidays so you will not need to consider them part of your six weeks uncontracted time or need to make up the hours.

Time of day

Daytime (regular, non GPEW premium eligible) hours are Monday to Friday between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. To calculate your yearly daytime non GPEW premium eligible hours, multiply the number of daytime hours you work per week by 46 (if your weekly hours vary, use the average).

Premium (GPEW premium eligible) hours are Monday to Friday, from 6 to 8 a.m. and 5 to 10 p.m., plus Saturdays, Sundays and statutory holidays (as recognized by MSI). These hours are paid at a higher rate than daytime hours. You can only claim GPEW hours if you are seeing patients (in person or virtually) during that time. You cannot claim GPEW hours if you are doing indirect patient care only (such as charting, writing referrals, reviewing lab/DI reports). To capture indirect hours worked during premium time, add them to your daytime (non GPEW premium) hours calculation of annual contracted hours. To determine your annual contracted GPEW hours, use the same methodology used to calculate your daytime (non-GPEW) hours above.

Practice management doesn’t count

When projecting your contracted hours, only count the time you will be doing direct and indirect clinical work. Do not include the time you spend managing your practice or providing clinical support services. Your 10% clinical support service payment is intended to cover some of this work. Do not track or bill hours for this kind of work. These hours are automatically added to your biweekly payments and to your annual adjustment should you work more hours than you were contracted to work. Note: Physicians may choose how they direct their time within this 10%.

Hospitalist work

If you do hospitalist work and you know how many weeks per year you’ll be working, you can deduct that number from the 46-week requirement – just be sure to include your hospitalist work in the notes section below the practice schedule. When projecting your annual contracted hours of work you multiply your weekly average by 46 weeks minus the number of weeks you’ll be doing hospitalist work; for example, if you’re going to do six weeks of hospitalist work per year, you’d use 40 weeks as your multiplier to determine annual contracted (projected) hours of work.