A recent repor from Merritt Hawkins, based on a sample of more than 3,000 physician and advanced practitioner search assignments, shows family medicine physicians are still the most requested physician specialty, for the 13th year running.
A few other trends of note:
- Large health systems, particularly those that have recently consolidated, are proactively recruiting primary care physicians in groups of 200 or more to create networks to serve larger patient populations.
- While demand for family medicine physicians is high, it is declining. Merritt Hawkins credits this in part to routine swings in physician recruitment, but also to another factor: patients. Data indicates primary care visits are declining, while visits to nurse practitioners and physician assistants are skyrocketing, potentially due to the limited access to family medicine physicians.
- Internal medicine is also a difficult specialty to recruit, as many physicians subspecialize or go into hospital medicine. The responsibilities of the office-based internal medicine physician are being taken on by pulmonologists, geriatricians and others.
Read more here.
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