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Physician
Supply Model
[D]
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.
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