Online Workforce Tool Evaluates Physician Shortage

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

The University of North Carolina has recently launched a new online tool which claims to be capable of predicting and analyzing physician shortages.

The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (UNC) announced the launch of an online workforce tool “to help policy makers, physicians, and health systems better plan where to practice and what type of practitioners will be needed to meet the growing utilization of healthcare in the United States.”

The FutureDocs Forecasting Tool is a web-based model that estimates the supply of physicians, use of physician services, and capacity of the physician workforce. According to iBeat Health, it can be used to view different scenarios, including:

• adoption of state insurance exchanges or Medicaid expansion
• alterations to the amount of patient care full-time employees
• redistribution of graduate medical education slots
• the use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants

“It’s important to recognize that the national dialogue about physician supply has been narrowly focused until now,” said Erin Fraher, Ph.D., leader of the development team at the Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy, part of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“National data on the numbers of physicians needed in various specialties is neither accurate nor useful for workforce planning and policy at the local and state level. Instead, we need to understand how alternative combinations of physicians and other healthcare providers can provide needed services in a market area. The FutureDocs Forecasting tool provides the information that states and regions need to plan for ways to train, recruit, retain or redesign the workforce required to meet their population’s health care needs.”

Interestingly, the tool found the shortage stems not from lack of doctors but how they are distributed throughout each specialty. It predicted:

• capacity to treat pediatric surgery patients could double by 2030
• the number of patient care full-time employees could decline by 12 percent in general internal medicine between 2011 and 2030
• the number of mental health visits already exceeded capacity in 2011 and could become worse by 2030

“This model is not intended to provide a single right answer about physician shortages,” said Dr. Fraher. “Our hope is that the FutureDocs Forecasting Tool will reframe how people think about physician supply and demand, and that the model will help educate and engage stakeholders to create actionable workforce policy at the local and national levels.”