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Important Financial Improvements: Moving from Monthly to Quarterly Bonus Structure

Dear Partners,

The Finance department, with input from both the Finance committee and Starling Board, continues to work diligently to streamline operations including our financial reporting process. Thank you for your patience as we look to implement changes to improve the department.

You should have received an email on April 17th. That email outlined moving from a monthly bonus structure to a quarterly one. In this email, we also shared the goals we aspire to achieve for our physicians:

  • Provide more accurate reporting with tools for tracking errors/accountability
  • Provide more detailed proactive feedback on your results with focus on analytics to identify areas for improvement/opportunity
  • Respond to recommendations from the external annual audit made by our CPA firm
  • Ensure strong banking relationships (appropriate assets/lending power)
  • Vendor annual renewal assessments (identify cost savings opportunities)
  • Make improvements to financial reporting tools, like QlikView, with a focus on increasing physician utilization to promote transparency
  • Integrate branch policies to allow for a more efficient/cost effective department

To this end the Starling Board, with input from the Finance committee, has authorized a shift from our current monthly bonus structure to a quarterly one. In addition, the Board approved a policy on monthly draws, automatic bonus distributions, and a “bank” in order to bring the two branches under the same policy. The changes are described below.

Monthly Draw and Bonus
  1. Effective with pay periods April 1, 2018, we will begin bonusing profits quarterly. After the April 30th bonus, the next bonus is not scheduled until July 31, 2018. The bonus paid on July 31, 2018 will cover earnings in excess of your draw for the period April 1 – June 30th and will be made automatically.
  2. The Board has recommended that draws be set up to a maximum of 90% of your prior year earnings (draw + bonuses). For those physicians who have kept a low draw and left large bonuses, we would recommend adjusting these together into a new higher monthly draw which meets the 90% guideline. This way, there will be no large bonus held by Starling over the quarter.

Please contact Michele Guerrette at mguerrette@starlingphysicians.com in Payroll and Jerry Domanico at jdomanico@starlingphysicians.com in Finance if you would like to increase your existing monthly draw to an amount that is within this 90% maximum.

For those who would like to have a lower monthly draw or leave it the same as it is set currently, please notify the above as well. If income drops below 90% for 2 consecutive quarters and a deficit is created monthly draws will be adjusted accordingly.

What Information Will be Available Monthly
  1. The finance team will continue closing the practice expenses each month and these will be available to you and your practice managers in QlikView, as they are now. You will still be able to track department expenses and compare them to prior periods and against budget.
  2. Monthly billing results will still be available in QlikView and via the practice revenue reports from GE Centricity.
  3. We will continue issuing non-patient revenue recap summaries to department leadership and practice managers on a monthly basis.
Bank

The organization has historically required that former CMG partners maintain a bank based on the lesser of one month’s draw or $20,000. There was no similar bank required on the former GH branch. Beginning with bonuses paid beginning on July 31st, we will be working towards a bank of $10,000 for all shareholders. This bank will provide retained earnings for Starling providing appropriate cash balance for operational needs and lending power of the organization. We will be paying down the former CMG banks that are in excess of $10,000 over the next three quarterly bonuses. For the former GH we will be creating a bank of $10,000 for each physician over the next 12 quarterly bonuses.

We believe these changes will greatly enhance the quality and spectrum of services provided by your finance department.  This represents a significant step towards integration of branches allowing for more focused efforts on improving efficiency and costs moving forward.  

If you have any questions or comments please contact any of the Starling Board members or your branch VP (Dr. Gorusu at mgorusu@starlingphysicians.com for CMG/ Dr. Stein at jstein@starlingphysicians.com for GH).