Physician Shortage Addressed By Online Tool

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

The University Of North Carolina’s Center for Health Services Research has taken on the problem of physician supply and shortages, and has come up with an answer in the form of an online tool.

FutureDocs Forecasting Tool, the creation of professors from the center, gives users a better awareness of fluctuations within doctor specializations in the near future.

Forecasting of this kind has always been important, but with the prospect of adding Medicaid on to the Affordable Care Act, the risk of a flood of patients coming down on a small number of doctors is a looming problem. The tool handles different variables that influence doctor availability, including ones like the Medicaid expansion.

The Tool

Dr. Erin Fraher, assistant professor in family medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, and leader of the development the team, provides a description of the tool and its design:

The FutureDocs Forecasting Tool is an interactive, web-based tool that gives better information about what health workforce shortages might exist in the future. It’s innovative, new, and different because we actually created a tool that you could access yourself online and you can create your own customized visualization. Fundamentally, this tool is different because most past workforce models have started with the question of how many doctors are we going to need; we started with the question of “what are the patients’ needs for healthcare,” and “what different configurations of physicians might be able to meet those needs.”

The Problem

Fraher also notes that the talk of the 130,000 physician shortage in the U.S. is somewhat misleading. The FutureDocs tool indicates that there isn’t actually a doctor shortage, and that the problem is, instead, a question of distribution. Physicians are in the wrong places, and not properly distributed across specialties.

To address getting a better look at the problem, Fraher has worked for the past three years with a team that includes economists, workforce planners, cartographers, web developers, and more. The model has provided a new look at the anecdotal evidence around the physician shortage — according to FutureDocs, the Medicaid problem isn’t really much of a problem at all.

The Users

The FutureDocs tool is designed for anyone to use, and with good reason. While the tool was designed to solve the perceived doctor shortage issue in North Carolina, the team is hoping that others will use the tool to create a lasting impact on how we structure the physician workforce in the U.S.

“We hope that health systems and others will use the data to help figure out innovative ways that they might configure their workforce. We want to give people the data they need to redesign the way they are delivering care and have the information they need to know what’s coming down the pike for them.”

The tool is available for public use here, and provides interactive maps broken down by state and county, prediction modeling out to the year 2030, user guides, as well as the option to build models around your own specific preferences.