Rapid growth in NP and PA supply will likely mitigate national physician shortage
May 5, 2017
Andy Knapton, MSc; Erin Fraher; PhD, MPP
Presentation to the 13th Annual AAMC Health Workforce Research Conference
Presentation Overview
- Numerous forecasts have projected a future shortage of physicians. These forecasts have struggled to quantify the effect that the expanding supply of NPs and PAs will have on physician demand in the future.
- We developed a micro-simulation model that forecasts the supply of physicians, utilization of physician services, and capacity of the physician workforce to meet future demand. The model’s baseline model includes the supply of services available from only physicians, but two alternative NP and PA growth rates are investigated.
- By making use of the growth in supply of NPs & PAs the forecast undersupply of physicians can be resolved. However, geographic and physician specialty supply issues remain.
Related Work
This work was supported by the Physicians Foundation.