Workforce Shortages, Increased Patient Populations, and Funding Woes Pressure U.S. Primary-Care System
The experts say…
There are some rock stars and heroes of primary care that are not as well-known to medical students as they should be.
Elbert Huang, MD
former president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, hospitalist, Scotland Memorial Hospital, Laurinburg, N.C.
Only about 32% of physicians in the U.S. are practicing primary care….We’re going in the wrong direction.
Kathleen Klink, MD
Director of the Division of Medicine and Dentistry in the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)
Many newer osteopathic schools are positioning themselves in rural communities, helping them attract students who might not have gone to medical school otherwise.
Ed Salsberg
Director of the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis in the Health Resources and Services Administration
If hospitalists did not exist, there would still be declining interest in primary care among medical students and residents.
Vineet Arora, MD, MPP, FHM
Hospitalist, University of Chicago
We’re all in the same workforce; we’re all trying to take care of patients. The discussion needs to be on how do we coordinate, not over turf wars.
Lori Heim, MD
Former president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, hospitalist, Scotland Memorial Hospital, Laurinburg, N.C.
What we’re looking at now is that there’s a shortage of somewhere around 90,000 physicians in the next 10 years, increasing in the five years beyond that to 125,000 or more.
Atul Grover, MD, PhD
Chief public policy officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges
It’s been about 15 years since the last surge of interest in primary care as a career, when U.S. medical graduates temporarily reversed a long decline by flocking to family medicine, general internal medicine, and pediatrics. Newly minted doctors responded enthusiastically to a widely held perception in the mid-1990s that primary care would be central to a brave new paradigm of managed healthcare delivery.
That profound change never materialized, and the primary-care workforce has since resumed a downward slide that is sounding alarm bells throughout the country. Even more distressing, the medical profession’s recent misfortunes have spread far beyond the doctor’s office.
“What we’re looking at now is that there’s a shortage of somewhere around 90,000 physicians in the next 10 years, increasing in the five years beyond that to 125,000 or more,” says Atul Grover, MD, PhD, chief public policy officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. The association’s estimates suggest that the 10- and 15-year shortfalls will be split nearly evenly between primary care and other specialties.
Hospitalists could feel that widening gap as well. With increasing numbers of aging baby boomers reaching Medicare eligibility and 32 million Americans set to join the ranks of the insured by 2019 through the Affordable Care Act, primary care’s difficulties arguably are the closest to a full-blown crisis. “Primary care in the United States needs a lifeline,” began a 2009 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine.1 And that was before an estimate suggesting that new insurance mandates will require an additional 4,307 to 6,940 primary-care physicians to meet demand before the end of the decade contributing about 15% to the expected shortfall.2
Why should hospitalists care about the fate of their counterparts? For starters, what’s good for outpatient providers is good for a sound healthcare system. Researchers have linked strong
primary care to lower overall spending, fewer health disparities, and higher quality of care.3
Hospitalists and primary-care physicians (PCPs) also are inexorably linked. They follow similar training and education pathways, and need each other to ensure safe transitions of care. And despite the evidence pointing to a slew of contributing factors, HM regularly is blamed for many of primary care’s mounting woes.
Based on well-functioning healthcare systems around the world, analysts say the ideal primary-care-to-specialty-care-provider ratio should be roughly 40:60 or 50:50. According to Kathleen Klink, MD, director of the Division of Medicine and Dentistry in the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), only about 32% of physicians in the U.S. are practicing primary care. Unless something changes, that percentage will erode even further. “We’re going in the wrong direction,” Dr. Klink says.
