U.S. physician workforce forecasting: a tale of two states.

Abstract

Physician workforce forecasting in the U.S. has returned to preeminence in the recent past. With the publication of the federal Council on Graduate Medical Education's Sixteenth Report: Physician Workforce Policy Guidelines for the United States, 2000-2020, efforts have begun to examine specialty- and geography-specific forecasts to determine the extent to which the projected national shortage of physicians will affect particular specialties and populations in particular areas. This article begins with a brief history of physician workforce forecasting in the U.S. over the past 25 years and summarizes the findings of two state-specific attempts to forecast physician supply and demand in the coming years. Discussions of the findings from the two studies as well as a brief commentary on how particular model assumptions obfuscate interpretation of the forecasts are provided. Finally, a brief discussion of how the forecasts were used by stakeholders in each state is presented.