There is a bit of a disagreement emerging within the healthcare sector among people who are thoroughly convinced of a physician shortage that will only grow worse and others who think that the problem is not as bad as it appears. The disagreement was highlighted in a May 2019 Advisory Board article written by contributing editor Ashley Fuoco Antonelli.
In her article, Antonelli pointed out data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) that puts the physician shortage at nearly 122,000 by 2032. Like others, the AAMC cites an aging population and their need for more healthcare services as one of the primary factors contributing to the shortage.
Antonelli also pointed to other data that demonstrates the perceived shortage may not be so dire. She referenced a study published by JAMA in 2017 that looked at the total number of primary care physicians as compared to the total number of patients seeking care. Using the baseline of 1,500 patients per doctor – as recommended by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality – it looks like we have more than enough primary care physicians to meet demand.
Making Sense of the Data
The thing about data is that it does not lie. So what do we do with the conflicting physician shortage data? Understanding that data doesn’t lie, there’s only one reason data could show such drastically different scenarios: it is not being understood the same way by all those tasked with interpreting it.
Let us use a comparable example to explain the point. Say you have a vendor management system provided by a healthcare staffing MSP. Each person who uses that system can customize his or her own dashboard to display the most important data at a glance. Because each user is different, they all view the data from different angles. As a result, they all interpret the data differently.
In the case of the doctor shortage, people are looking at raw numbers without understanding what they mean. If you look only at the number of physicians as opposed to the number of patients, it is easy to project that we will not have enough doctors to meet future demand. But if you dig deeper into how medical staffing is currently being utilized, you discover something interesting: a bigger problem than the perceived doctor shortage is how current resources are being utilized.
Better Resource Management
To whatever extent the doctor shortage might not be as bad as it looks, better resource management might be the right answer in the long term. Rather than concentrating healthcare services in major cities and continuing to encourage a broad array of individual specialties, maybe we should work toward de-emphasizing specialties and finding ways to even out the imbalance between where healthcare services are available and where they are lacking.
Just like facilities can adopt healthcare and managed services to manage distribution of services within their own environments, the industry as a whole could do a better job managing resources across the board. Data suggests that doing so could greatly alleviate any doctor shortage that currently exists.
In the meantime, facilities must rely on a variety of strategies to provide continuity of care even in the midst of staffing shortages. Among them is the locum tenens strategy. Locum tenens are no longer viewed as a short-term, stopgap measure. Locum tenens have become a core part of facility staffing strategies among both hospitals and group practices.
Is the doctor shortage really as bad as it looks? Perhaps not. Maybe it is really more of a matter of not properly distributing resources.
