Physician Supply Model

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BHPr’s Physician Supply Model produces national projections of physician supply for 36 medical specialties through 2020, which are aggregated into 18 specialties for comparison to the PRM projections. The PSM is an inventory model that tracks the supply of physicians by age, sex, country of medical education (whether United States medical graduates [USMG] or international medical graduates [IMG]), type of degree (i.e., Medical Doctor [MD] or Doctor of Osteopathy [DO]), ^[2] medical specialty, and primary activity (e.g., patient care or non-patient care).

The PSM (Exhibit 1) projects the future supply of physicians based on:

• Number of physicians in the preceding year (starting with the base year 2000),
• Number of new USMGs and IMGs, and
• Attrition due to retirement, death and disability.

The PSM produces two measures of physician supply: (1) the number of active physicians and (2) the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) physicians. One FTE is defined as the average annual hours worked in patient care per physician in 2000, and these estimates vary by specialty. Women and older physicians historically have worked fewer patient care hours, on average, compared to male and younger physicians, and because a growing proportion of the physician workforce is female and older the FTE supply of physicians is growing slightly slower than the number of active physicians. Below, we describe the major components of the PSM and our findings.