Member Q&A: Weighted and Risk-Adjusted Patient Panel Sizes - 5/27/2026
OfflineNorthwestern Medicine Asks: Are you using Weighted or Risk Adjusted Panel sizes? Several organizations would like to meet on this topic.
Submitted by:
Billy Steiner
Program Director, Primary Care Service Line
Member Responses
Optum Health
Krysten Wyrick, MD
At Optum WA, we count all risk lives (Med advantage patients mostly) as 2:1 for panel size attribution. Brings the total panel size down some for better access if a clinician has a large MA panel.
North Memorial Health
Shah Meetul, MD
At North, we are not currently using any sort of weighting when it comes to panel sizes. In my previous life, we used Mark Murray's visit frequency data to age- and gender-adjust our panels. That model was felt to multiply the impact on providers, i.e., when a patient was adjusted downward by visit frequency, which impacted the per panel compensation metric, it also impacted the productivity measure as those patients had fewer visits.
Providence Medical Group Oregon
Lori Gluck, MD
Medical Director Value Based Care
At Providence Medical Group we mostly use a demographic adjusted panel size.
Guthrie Clinic
Frederick J. Bloom, Jr. MD, MMM
Chief Population Health Officer
At Guthrie we have attempted to risk adjust our panel sizes for access. As a marker of severity and access need, we have used the average number of patient visits/year to adjust the panel size. This helps us predict access needs based on current provider’s practice style. It makes sure that patients have an opportunity to see their provider when the provider states to follow up in a specific time frame. However, the downside is that this adjustment does not incent a provider to see the patient less often or only when necessary. It encourages the "every 3 month" approach to follow up. We are starting to calculate RAF scores by providers based on HCC coding but have not used this for risk adjustment of panel sizes or incentives.
0 Conclusions