System Director Physician Compensation

UNC Health•Morrisville, NC

23h•Hybrid

About The Position

The System Director Physician Compensation provides strategic and operational leadership for physician compensation across a large, multi-hospital, multi-specialty health system. The role designs, implements, and maintains fair, competitive, and compliant compensation programs that support organizational strategy, clinical integration, quality outcomes, and financial sustainability. The director works closely with executive leadership, finance, legal, compliance, and physician enterprise leadership to align compensation with internal equity, market benchmarks, regulatory requirements, and system-wide performance goals. The position combines extensive physician compensation expertise and healthcare business acumen with leadership of high-performing teams and hands-on subject matter expertise. This position is employed by NC Health, a private, fully owned subsidiary of UNC Health Care System, in a department providing shared services to operations across UNC Health Care. The role is hybrid, based in Morrisville, North Carolina, and is a full-time day job with 40 standard hours per week. The position is exempt from overtime.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in an appropriate discipline.
Seven years of related experience, including at least five years of management experience.
Knowledge of physician compensation structures, benchmarks, and best practices.
Strong understanding of Stark Law, the Anti-Kickback Statute, and related regulatory frameworks.
Advanced analytical skills, including modeling, forecasting, and interpreting complex data.
Excellent communication and presentation skills, including the ability to explain complex concepts to clinical and non-clinical audiences.
Strong relationship-building skills and ability to influence and collaborate with senior leaders and physicians.
Integrity and discretion, with commitment to fairness, transparency, and compliance.
Proficiency with Excel and analytics tools.
Ability to work collaboratively with executive leadership, finance, legal, compliance, physician leaders, HR, IT, and operations.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with HRIS, payroll, and practice management systems.
Experience with physician compensation market benchmarks such as MGMA, SullivanCotter, and AMGA.

Responsibilities

Develop and lead physician compensation strategy aligned with organizational goals, clinical integration, and population health initiatives.
Design and maintain productivity-based, value-based, hybrid, call-pay, and leadership-stipend compensation models for employed and affiliated physicians.
Integrate quality, patient experience, and access metrics into compensation plans.
Advise executive leadership on financial and operational implications of compensation strategies, including scenario modeling and long-term planning.
Oversee development, implementation, and annual review of physician compensation plans across the enterprise.
Benchmark compensation against national and regional market data to support internal equity and external competitiveness.
Standardize compensation frameworks where appropriate while allowing specialty- and market-specific customization.
Manage on-call, hospital-based services, medical directorships, and other service arrangements for consistency, fairness, and compliance.
Ensure compensation arrangements comply with Stark Law, the Anti-Kickback Statute, IRS guidelines for not-for-profit entities, and other applicable regulations.
Partner with legal and compliance to obtain and maintain fair market value and commercial reasonableness opinions.
Develop and maintain compensation governance structures, policies, and oversight processes.
Maintain documentation and audit trails for compensation decisions, methodologies, and approvals.
Lead development of compensation analytics and dashboards to monitor productivity, compensation ratios, incentives, and budget alignment.
Collaborate with finance to model the financial impact of compensation changes, new programs, and physician alignment strategies.
Monitor KPIs such as wRVUs, panel size, quality metrics, and compensation per wRVU to identify trends and issues.
Provide reports and presentations to executive leadership, physician leaders, and governance committees.
Serve as a subject matter expert and advisor to physician leaders, practice administrators, HR, and finance on physician compensation.
Facilitate physician communication and education regarding compensation plans, performance metrics, and changes.
Partner with physician recruitment and onboarding teams to ensure offers align with compensation philosophy, fair market value, and internal equity.
Partner with executive compensation to incorporate physician compensation data into executive offers and support internal and market consistency.
Support compensation-related conflict resolution using transparent data and clear explanations of methodologies.
Establish and refine processes for compensation plan design, implementation, monitoring, and annual review.
Identify opportunities to streamline processes, improve data integrity, and enhance user experience.
Collaborate with HR, IT, and operations to ensure payroll, HRIS, practice management, and EMR systems support accurate and timely compensation calculations.