No Pending Physician Shortage: Study

Better use of existing doctors will meet nation's needs

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

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TUESDAY, March 7 (HealthDay News) -- Despite dire predictions of a looming physician shortage, the United States has enough doctors to last through 2020, if they are used efficiently, a new study finds.

"It's not how many physicians there are, it's what the physicians do," said study author Dr. David Goodman, a professor of pediatrics and of community and family medicine at the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School.

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A number of organizations, including the Association of American Medical Colleges, have been predicting a shortage of physicians -- largely as a result of the burgeoning elderly population -- and are calling for expanded enrollments at medical schools. An increased enrollment of 15 percent, translating into 3,000 more graduates each year, along with a removal of Medicare funding limits for graduate medical education, should ease the problem, they claim.

But quantity may not always equal quality, contend the authors of the new study, which appears in the March/April issue of Health Affairs. They found that regions and states with more medical specialists and general internists have lower quality of care, as measured by death rates and other performance standards.

Using the Medicare claims database, Goodman and his colleagues looked at the experiences of people at the end of life who received most of their medical care at academic medical centers. Then they analyzed how many physician hours were spent to care for patients during the last six months of their life.

"These were very standardized cohorts of Medicare patients so that we would know that the patient populations were similar," Goodman explained. "All the patients died and all were cared for at academic medical centers, which have high-quality care so the overt quality question was taken out of the study."

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