The Declining Presence of Family Physicians in Hospital-Based Care

Despite training to provide care across the continuum of health delivery settings, the proportion of family physicians (FPs) reporting inpatient care has decreased by 26% between 2013 and 2017, leaving approximately 1 in 4 of FPs practicing hospital medicine in 2017. Policy makers, payers, and leaders in medical education should closely track the impact of these trends, given previous evidence associating better cost and utilization outcomes with broader scope of practice. Comprehensiveness is one of the Starfield’s core tenets of primary care. Patients of family physicians (FPs) with a broader scope of practice have been shown to have lower overall health care spending.