The Bureau of Medicine Information System (BUMIS) contains computerized records of all individuals in the Medical Corps. This research memorandum identifies some of the limitations of this data set for the analysis of physician retention and makes recommendations for improving the BUMIS.-iii- EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThe Bureau of Medicine Information System (BUMIS) contains computerized records of all Navy Medical Corps personnel. Recent CNA analyses of physician retention from FY 1984 through FY 1988 relied heavily on information from BUMIS. This research memorandum identifies some limitations of the BUMIS data set for analyzing physician retention, describes the procedures used to overcome these limitations, and recommends ways to improve the data for future analyses.Recent CNA analyses of physician retention focused on three areas. The first area was the identification of key retention decision points in a Navy medical officer's career. The second area of analysis was to determine physician retention by clinical specialty. The last area of analysis was estimating the statistical relationship between physician pay and retention. Data problems limited the scope of the analysis in each of these analytical areas. IDENTIFICATION OF KEY RETENTION DECISION POINTSA Navy physician reaches a retention decision point only after completing any active duty obligation. The first decision point, termed the end of initial obligation, is particularly important because at that point, the physician decides whether to make a long-term commitment to the Navy based on the relative benefits of a Navy medical career.Identification of the end of initial obligation requires extensive knowledge of the various types of accession and training obligations that Navy physicians incur. Most of the required information is available on BUMIS. However, the identification of the end of initial obligation would be considerably simplified if BUMIS included a variable recording the length of the obligation that a physician incurs through an accession program. For physicians accessing under the Armed Forces Health Professions Scholarship Program (AFHPSP), this obligation ranges from two to four years. For direct accessions (volunteers), this obligation ranges from one to three years.Without information on the length of the accession obligation, the end of initial obligation cannot be determined exactly and must be identified from the physician's obligated service date (OSD), a variable recording the end of the physician's most recent obligation. The identification procedure used by CNA relies on the fact that the OSD reflects only accession and training obligations. The recent use of this field to include obligations under the Medical Officer Retention Bonus (MORB) may invalidate future use of the procedures developed by CNA to identify the end of initial obligation and make it difficult to analyze retention after FY 1988. -V- SPECIALTY RETENTION RATESBUMIS is the sole source of accurate information on the clinical specialties of physicians. A rece...

CNA's annotated briefings are either condensed presentations of the results of formal CNA studies that have bee documented elsewhere or stand-alone presentations of research reviewed and endorsed by CNA. These briefings the best opinion of CNA at the time of issue. They do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Department ol f* r\r\r\-%

CNA 7a. NAME OF MONITORING ORGANIZATION Commandant of the Marine Corps (Code RDS) 6c. ADDRESS (City, State, and ZIP Code