A new study finds that pay gaps between men and women are greater at physician practices that also have greater proportions of male physicians. The study, from The BMJ, looked at salary data of 18,800 U.S. physicians from nearly 9,900 physician practices between 2014 and 2018. Adjustments to salary were made based on physician specialty, years of experience, hours worked, measures of clinical workload, practice type, and geography.

Suspensions are an important tool that medical staffs can utilize for several reasons. First, suspensions explain the circumstances under which the medical staff will suspend a practitioner’s privileges because of failure to comply with one or more administrative requirements. Examples might include failure to maintain a valid medical license, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) certificate, or professional liability insurance; having incomplete/delinquent medical records; and so forth. A best practice is to replace the term automatic suspension with a section entitled “Automatic Relinquishment of Privileges.” This is much more than just semantics and will be examined further in more detail to follow.