Physician groups, government agencies and many U.S. medical schools are concerned with a potential physician shortage and are calling for an increase in the number of physicians trained each year. However, new research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that the current U.S. physician supply is large enough to meet the needs of patients. Jonathan Weiner, DrPH, the study's author and a professor in the School's Department of Health Policy and Management, compared the current supply of U.S. physicians with the staffing at several large medical group practices that treat health maintenance organizations (HMO) patients. He found that an increase in the number of physicians might not be necessary. His study, entitled "Prepaid Group Practice Staffing and U.S. Physician Supply: Lessons for Workforce Policy," is featured in the Feb. 4, 2004, online issue of the journal Health Affairs.
"Over the last few years, a general consensus has developed among medical training institutions that there are not enough specialist physicians in the educational pipeline. The question of how many physicians a community needs has become quite controversial lately, and there has been precious little evidence to support this debate. By analyzing the number and types of doctors that serve the members of these HMOs, considerable light has been shed on this topic," said Dr. Weiner.
Prepaid group practices (PGPs) are well-organized multi-specialty medical groups that are reimbursed by capitation to serve the enrollees of HMOs. They were among the first to establish coordinated approaches to care delivery, and to use nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Many of the characteristics of PGPs have been widely copied by other health care plans, even though the PGP model itself is still relatively new.
The study included not-for-profit PGPs from six units of Kaiser Permanente, which is based in California, as well as the Group Health Coopera
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Contact: Kenna L. Brigham
paffairs@jhsph.edu
410-955-6878
Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
4-Feb-2004
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