AHRQ commissioned the Robert Graham Center, a non-partisan primary care policy and analysis organization, to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the primary care workforce, which has experience a shortage of physicians. The goal of the analysis is to inform policy discussions around the U.S. primary care workforce. Key findings from that analysis include the following points:
• Of the 624,434 U.S. physicians who spend the majority of their time in direct patient care, slightly less than one-third are specialists in primary care.
• Family physicians (79,831) and general practitioners (9,557), general internists (71,487), general pediatricians (44,933) and geriatricians (2,999) make up the total 209,000 practicing primary care physicians in the United States.
• Of the nearly 956 million visits that Americans made to office-based physicians in 2008, 51.3 percent were to primary care physicians.
Related Articles on Primary Care:
Maryland to Increase Primary Care Workforce by 25% by 2020
Walmart Seeks to Become Nation’s Largest Primary Care Provider
500 Federally Qualified Health Centers to Participate in Demonstration Project to Improve Quality
