The Little White Lies of Radiology Partners

The American College of Radiology runs a large and presumably quite profitable job forum. (I believe they outsource its management to a third-party company, but it’s on their website, and their branding is all over it.)

And I’m sure the ACR doesn’t want to police the content of that job forum, if nothing else because nitpicking job listings may discourage people from paying for said listings. Outside of the logistics and hassle, there is an obvious financial incentive to look the other way to potentially misleading content.

However.

I don’t see how one can justify allowing Radiology Partners to disingenuously call itself an “independent private practice” on its job postings (other than by just acknowledging the financial conflict that RP is probably the job forum’s largest customer by a wide margin).

I’m not even saying these are bad jobs. Quality is irrelevant here. You are what you are, and pretending you’re not a nationwide private equity conglomerative corporate practice in a job listing for a teleradiology position is only something you do because you don’t want to get filtered out of people’s search queries.

Here are the options for “work setting” they could have picked:

• Academic institution
• Independent private practice
• National radiology practice
• Health system or hospital
• Hospital-affiliated group practice
• Non-hospital group practice
• Multi-specialty entity
• Outpatient clinic
• Military Treatment Facility
• U.S. Public Health Service
• Department of Veterans Affairs facility
• Teleradiology
• Locum Tenens/Independent Contractor
• Other (Please specify)

If you believe in your model and are proud of your practice, then why pretend that you are independent when you’re not? Why not just pick “teleradiology” for a tele job? The straightforward explanation is that they know what job applicants want/are searching for, and their ads will perform better if that’s how they’re listed.

All the RP listings I’ve seen–and not just for the direct RP corporate offerings like this but also for their individual groups–describe the work setting as independent private practice.

This seems, at best, duplicitous and disingenuous. The generally accepted meaning of an independent practice is a business owned and operated entirely by its physicians (and not a hospital, health system, or other business/corporate entity). Physicians are the minority owners of Radiology Partners.

It doesn’t matter if one believes that independence or some variety of corporate structure is better (or even if they’re on the whole equal). There are multiple different options, and RP is cynically picking the wrong one.

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Meanwhile, a quick update about that non-independent parent corporate entity, as reported in Radiology Business this week:

S&P said it is placing all Rad Partners’ ratings on CreditWatch with negative implications. This reflects “heightened downside risk,” analysts noted, given the potential that RP might default on its loans or engage in a distressed exchange in 2024.