The industry braces for Affordable Care Act mandates in 2014.
With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and its ultimate impact on the bottom line coming in 2014, healthcare organizations have decided to hold their budgets for pay increases steady this year.
In the healthcare industry as a whole, pay increase budgets have remained stable at 2.4 percent with a small expected increase to 2.5 percent in 2014, according to data from the 2013 Comprehensive Data Healthcare survey. The survey, which reached over 8,300 healthcare facilities, shows little movement in these budgets from previous years. Pay increase budgets were at 2.5 percent in 2012 and 2.4 percent in 2011. Organizations still lack knowledge about the exact impact the Affordable Care Act will have on their bottom lines, and have opted to control workforce costs to ready themselves for the impending changes.
Pay increase budgets are used by employers to make a variety of adjustments to employee salaries, including merit increases, market adjustments, and promotional increases. More than 74 percent of organizations reported using pay increase budgets for merit increases, which averaged 2.1 percent. Of those surveyed, 39 percent used pay increase budgets for market adjustments, while 18.4 percent used it for promotional increases. Cost of living adjustments were made by 11 percent of respondents, with the average adjustment at 2.2 percent.
While the industry-wide rate was steady, some subsets of the healthcare sector reported larger changes. Behavioral healthcare facilities reported an average pay increase budget for 2013 of 2.4 percent, up from 1.6 percent in 2011. Critical access hospitals and physician clinics saw a slight decrease from 2.8 percent in 2010 to 2.6 percent this year.
The Comprehensive Data Healthcare survey covers over 8,300 organizations. It gathers information on pay, benefits and pay practices for nearly 250 industry-specific job titles and 400 benchmark titles.
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