More Primary Care Physicians Needed by 2025 Following Passage of the Affordable Care Act

A research team from the Robert Graham Center and the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine estimates a 25-percent increase in the current workforce of primary care physicians will be needed by 2025.

According to the researchers, a 16-percent increase will be necessary to address population growth, while a 5-percent increase will be needed to address population aging. Also, a 3-percent increase will be needed to address insurance expansion following the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

In a study, published today in the November/December 2012 issue of the journal Annals of Family Medicine, the team examined population-based nationally representative data to project the number of primary care physicians needed to address the expected increases.

By 2025, they project that nearly 33,000 additional primary care physicians will be required to care for a growing population, and an additional 10,000 physicians will be needed to care for an aging population.

“As the population expands, gets older, and becomes increasingly insured, the use of primary care services will increase,” said corresponding author Winston Liaw, M.D., assistant clinical professor of family medicine in the VCU School of Medicine’s Fairfax Family Medicine residency program.

“These projections can be combined with workforce projections to determine whether primary care providers can meet these increases,” he said.

According to Liaw, more research must occur to determine whether our current and future primary care workforce can meet the projected increases in utilization in a way that ensures that access does not suffer.

Liaw added that the current system also “suffers from a maldistribution of resources with some areas enjoying an abundance of providers while other places are experiencing shortages.” Future studies will need to examine which areas specifically lack the number of providers needed to meet these projected increases.

This study was funded in part by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality through contract number HHSP233200900359P, reference number AHR1256.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A copy of the study is available for reporters from the journal by contacting Angela Sharma at (913) 269-2269 or via e-mail at asharma@aafp.org.

The full text of all articles is available free at www.annfammed.org.

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