Advanced practice providers (APPs) provide invaluable services to the cardiovascular team. These services are often not captured by RVUs, as APPs save time and resources in procedures, bundled payments, and free up physician time to engage in productive high RVU generating work.

However, the 13 APPs at our mostly-clinic-based practice found that the burden of bringing work home was increasing as more patients were added to our clinic day. This was a strong contrast to our hospital rounding weeks, which did not generate as many RVUs or work to be done at home.

MedAxiom's seventh annual Cardiovascular Provider Compensation and Production Survey, released in August, was an instrumental tool for negotiation at our institution when we were recently advised that our clinic appointment times would be shortened and there would be even more patients to be seen per day.

With the data provided on this survey, we were able to show that each APP at our practice already produced more than three times the RVUs compared to the national average general cardiology APP, and were above 90 percent of the highest RVU generating APPs.

Our administration had been comparing our productivity to primary care APP RVU production. After reviewing this data, we were allowed to opt out of seeing additional patients without penalty.

We are thankful to the ACC and MedAxiom for supporting this report and hope it can be beneficial to other cardiovascular professionals.