1. Faculty Senate Meeting - Call to Order

The Meeting was called to order by Dr. Harold Pine at 4:30 pm

2. Announcements

• Dr. Pine attended New Faculty Orientation when he spoke, Annie will be sending an email shortly regarding what he learned and sent to his department.
• Viima APP – Continue to use
• Introduces Aaron LeMay and Victor Moreno (Faculty Compensation Plan)
• 6/13 Next Faculty Senate Meeting will be hybrid – Marie Hall 4.622
• Next meeting vote for the next Chair-Elect (GSBS)
• Congrats to Chris Messenger – Elected Chair elect for the Faculty Advisory Council in Austin, TX for the next 3 years.

3. Aaron LeMay – Interim Chief Business Finance Officer

• Financial Update FYTD April 2022
• Beating net patient care revenue - 254 million over budget, favorable to budget.
  • Received Federal money that was not expected - received testing/vaccine money.
  • Not part of budget, impatient surgeries volumes and their corresponding work RVU's are below target within the budget. Targets will shift as we go later into the year, could be a budget spread. Impatient surgical volumes are not meeting those targets in both areas and part of that is not specifically doing less work, doing more work than last year. The issue is seeing impatient go down and outpatient going up, does not mean less surgeries, but it means our portfolio of those are changing.
• Directive payment plans of CHIRPS/TIPPS, have not received funds
• Designation with CMS to a rule designation to allow UTMB to have 100 new residents to come to campus. This is resetting salary reimbursements w/federal Government. So UTMB took a hit this year in reduction and funding of about $12 million that we will gain in the future years, as we reset our salary structures with the Federal Government.
• DONORS - Academic Enterprise received gifts of over $4.4 million - beating budget right now. Over $5.5 million more than last year.
• Received funds from FEMA $7.1 million for PPE associated with COVID-19. First UT system to collect.
• LABOR AND SUPPLIES - Labor is $37 million over budget; benefits are favorable to budget by a million dollars. Rely significantly on agency labor and overtime. Supplies - significant increase in pharmacy supplies, inflation impacting our supplies, supply chain disruptions, etc.

4.  Questions for Aaron/Victor

• Insight on Labor Cost, UTMB faculty and others paid lower than someone else 70 miles up the road. Replacing faculty is expensive, how can we maintain competitive pay and retain them longer and reap the benefits of their labor? – (Aaron) General Strategy, since started in position, looked at specific issue, not just faculty issue but an entire UTMB issue.  We started looking at where we are from a market standpoint, dove into the numbers over the last year, since than we did a $12 million market adjustment in November 2021. Discovered UTMB has not been properly handling market adjustments for any real line of business in any area/set up. Some areas more market salary oriented than others, not a consistent approach to the market. 5-10 years behind in market adjustments. Looking at what does that market strategy look like on a year-to-year basis for us to get caught up and to stay ahead.

• How do you create a budget in a time of uncertainty like with COVID and how do you factor in what could happen now that we are moving past the pandemic to a more endemic state? – (Aaron) Creating a budget is very difficult, more variables you throw into it the more difficult it becomes, so budget is a planning mechanism we take a run rate approach, what happened last year with our projection of what is going to happen in the next year we add that together to create our initial FYI report then we get feedback from different areas. We start with a base line approach than we add variable factors that we know will impact the finances, so as an example we that inflation is going to impact the finances, we know that we are going to do market adjustments and merit adjustments so we will add those into the financials. We have certain information, like in our grants world we know some baseline grants are going to occur. We project certain revenue lines; it is a multi-faceted approach. As we move past the pandemic to more of an endemic state, it is difficult to project cost with surges, etc.

• Is there a plan to update the Faculty Compensation Plan, how are the numbers formed and how would I implement the adjustment to the current compensation plan? – (Victor) We are doing market reviews right now, one was done last year and probably do two this year for faculty. We use double AMC benchmarks, they go up we go up and predominately if they go down, we do not adjust downward which they do. The Faculty Compensation Committee is reviewing recommendations from chairs right now and part of those are to increase the cap on the salaries and incentives. There are other nuances that are being mentioned as well as for physician scientist, for other ways to incentivize faculty. It all takes time; it is up to the committees to review and present them back to us. 
  

Meeting adjourned at 6:10PM.