US Primary Care Workforce Growth: A Decade of Limited Progress, and Projected Needs Through 2040 October, 2024

Despite efforts to mitigate a projected primary care physician (PCP) shortage required to meet an aging, growing, and increasingly insured population, shortages remain, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, growing inequity, and persistent underinvestment.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 expanded health coverage to 31 million Americans, accelerating demand for primary care. This rising demand has consistently outpaced the supply of primary care physicians (PCPs), particularly impacting vulnerable and underserved populations, due to persistent maldistribution. The COVID-19 pandemic further compounded the problem, accelerating demand, widening disparities, and stressing an already underfunded and overworked primary care sector.

Self-Reported Panel Size Among Family Physicians Declined by Over 25% Over a Decade (2013-2022) September, 2024

Underinvestment in primary care and erosion of the primary care physician workforce are resulting in patients across the US experiencing growing difficulty in obtaining access to primary care. Compounding this access problem, we find that the average patient panel size among US family physicians may have decreased by 25% over the past decade (2013 to 2022). Reversing the decline in access to primary care in the face of decreasing panel sizes requires both better supporting family physicians to manage larger panels, such as by expanding primary care teams, and substantially increasing the supply of family physicians.

Impact of response bias in three surveys on primary care providers’ experiences with electronic health records June, 2024

Physicians in primary care spend more time documenting care than other physicians and also coordinate care for their patients with other specialists, so it is vital to have high quality data sources about how they use EHRs. In particular, it is important to find policies that maximize the benefits of EHRs while minimizing their potential to add to physicians’ burdens. Thus, in this study, we compared primary care physicians’ (PCPs’) responses to three surveys, each intended to gather information on physicians’ use of EHRs but fielded with substantially different strategies: (1) the 2021 NEHRS; (2) the 2022 Continuous Certification Questionnaire (CCQ) from the American Board of Family Medicine (ABFM); and (3) the inaugural version of University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Physician Health IT Survey, which was also fielded in 2022.