Graduates from top-rated medical schools are about 50% less likely to start their careers as physicians in resource-poor areas than graduates from lower-ranked schools, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
To conduct the study, researchers from USC’s Viterbi Information Sciences Institute looked at a Medicare dataset with information on where physicians completed medical school and practice location. They combined that with data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Area Deprivation Index (ADI) Neighborhood Atlas. The measure accounts for housing, education, employment and other factors.
Among nearly 84,000 physicians in 2015, those who graduated from top 20 medical schools were 52% less likely to be practicing in socioeconomically deprived areas compared with those from lower-rated institutions, according to the findings, published May 28 in JAMA Network Open. Researchers observed a similar trend when looking at a dataset on newly licensed physicians in 2020.
Three other findings:
- Primary care physicians were more likely to practice in underserved areas than specialists. Radiologists, surgeons, anesthesiologists and ophthalmologists had significantly lower odds of practicing in high-need areas.
- Emergency medicine physicians from top medical schools were among the exceptions who were more likely to practice in underserved areas. While researchers did not explore the reasons behind physician practice decisions, they suspect demand for emergency services may be a reason for this trend. “Maybe there are simply more emergency services needed in those areas, so there are more job openings,” Mayank Kejriwal, PhD, principal scientist at ISI and one of the study authors, said in a news release.
- When looking at the 2015 cohort, researchers found men were slightly more likely to work in underserved areas. By 2020, the gap had disappeared.
Read the full study here.
