Katie Boysen

CMS finalized its 2027 physician fee schedule, and doctors are taking another pay cut: 𝟮.𝟯𝟭% for most physicians, deeper than proposed. This is personal for me. I grew up in a family of physicians in Spain. My mother is a cardiologist and my father is a pulmonologist, both in private practice and totally dedicated to their patients. But just like doctors here, they’re caught in a squeeze that’s turning physician-owned practices into an endangered species. On one side, pay is going down. This year’s cut is the latest in a decades-long trend: Medicare physician pay has fallen 33% since 2001 after inflation. On the other, just running the business keeps getting crazier. Insurers deny more claims and require prior auth for more procedures. Patients now pay 36% of their care, so there’s more to collect from them, too. That means more staff. Operating costs rose for 84% of medical groups this year. But there is reason to be hopeful. It has to do with AI. And no, I’m not talking about a dystopian “war of the bots,” with doctors’ AI and insurers’ AI denying and appealing each other into infinity. Or staffing your pediatrician’s front desk with robots. Just making things work better. At @Prosper, we found that by crushing a few core tasks – answering every call, sending more reminders, filing claims with zero errors – the average specialty practice could bring in about $𝟭𝟮𝟱,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗵𝘆𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿. For practices like my parents’, that could more than offset these cuts. It could help them stay independent. Link to our study in the reply. medicaleconomics.com/view/me…

Both my parents were doctors. I grew up seeing how much administrative problems frustrated them and got in the way of them doing what they love: caring for their patients. It doesn’t have to be that way. This is the heart of what @BKRBusinessMin and I talked about on this episode of @BeckersHR Podcast. I also shared the top findings from our 2026 @ProsperAI_HQ Growth Report quantifying exactly how specialty practices can add $125,000 per physician, or 11% revenue, every year. Listen here: teapaw.org/BeckersHR/status/21104…