The United States is running out of doctors. That sentence has appeared in healthcare headlines for years, but the magnitude and urgency of the problem are still not fully appreciated by the broader public — or, frankly, by many of the healthcare administrators and policymakers who need to act on it. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a physician shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036. The Health Resources and Services Administration has identified more than 7,400 Health Professional Shortage Areas for primary care alone, areas where nearly 74 million Americans live and struggle to access basic non-specialty care.
These numbers are alarming. But embedded within the physician shortage crisis is a second, less-discussed crisis that makes the first one worse: a physician data crisis. Healthcare organizations, recruiters, policymakers, and health systems are trying to solve a complex geographic and specialty mismatch problem with incomplete, outdated, and poorly structured data about where physicians are, where they are going, and what conditions affect their professional decisions. You cannot solve a workforce distribution problem you cannot accurately measure.
This article examines the dimensions of the physician shortage, the data challenges that are compounding it, and what healthcare organizations need to do to build the analytical foundation for sustainable workforce planning.
Medical deserts are expanding — and the data shows exactly where
The geographic dimension of the physician shortage is the most urgent and the least visible in national headlines. As documented in the Physician Data analysis of America’s medical deserts and where the crisis is worst, the shortage is not evenly distributed across the country. It is concentrated in specific geographies — rural counties, inner-city neighborhoods, and tribal lands — where the mismatch between patient need and physician availability is most extreme.
The HRSA’s Physician Workforce Projections for 2023 to 2038 paint a stark geographic picture: the adequacy of physician supply is projected to be just 42 percent in non-metro areas by 2038 — a shortage of 58 percent — compared to 95 percent in metro areas. That is not a modest disparity. It is a fundamental divide in access to care that will worsen considerably over the next decade if the structural forces driving it are not addressed.
For healthcare organizations trying to recruit into underserved areas, the data problem is compounded by the fact that most physician databases were built to serve urban health systems. Coverage of rural and frontier markets — the areas with the greatest need — is systematically weaker than coverage of metro markets. Organizations trying to address the medical desert problem with data tools built for a different geography will consistently underperform.
The shortage is real, unevenly distributed, and accelerating
The 2026 Main Residency Match was the largest in history, with 41,482 positions filled. That sounds like good news, and in some ways it is. But the Match results also highlight the persistent mismatch between where physicians are trained and where they are needed. Primary care specialties offered more than 20,700 positions — the largest share of the Match — but the pipeline flowing into underserved rural and urban communities remains critically thin.
Meanwhile, the retirement wave that workforce analysts have been warning about is beginning in earnest. Nearly half of the active physician workforce is expected to retire over the next decade. More than two of every five active physicians in the U.S. will be 65 or older within the next ten years. Around 18 percent of the existing physician workforce has expressed intentions to retire or opt out of patient care within the next year alone. The cumulative effect of a growing patient population, an aging physician workforce, and geographic maldistribution is a healthcare system under structural strain that is unlikely to resolve without deliberate, data-driven intervention.
Corporate medicine and non-physician providers are redrawing the healthcare buyer map
The physician workforce crisis is not only a shortage story. It is also a structural transformation story. As analyzed in the Physician Data examination of how corporate medicine, AI diagnostics, and the non-physician provider explosion are rewriting the healthcare buyer map, the ‘disappearing physician’ phenomenon is reshaping not just care delivery but the entire landscape of healthcare purchasing decisions.
Private equity firms are buying up independent practices at an accelerating rate, particularly in ophthalmology, orthopedics, and gastroenterology. PE ownership of physician practices reached 6.5 percent by late 2024 and is expected to climb higher in 2026. When a PE-owned management company controls twenty dermatology practices across three states, the purchasing decision for technology, supplies, and services no longer sits with the individual physician. It sits with a corporate procurement team that the traditional physician-targeting outreach model will never reach.
At the same time, the scope of practice for nurse practitioners and physician assistants is expanding in state after state. NPs and PAs are increasingly authorized to manage patient panels, make prescribing decisions, and serve as primary care providers in settings where physician recruitment has been unsuccessful. For pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare technology vendors, this means that the physician is no longer the sole — or even the primary — clinical decision-maker in a growing share of care settings.
The physician workforce crisis is a data crisis for healthcare marketers
For organizations that market to physicians and healthcare decision-makers, the workforce disruption creates a specific and urgent data problem: the maps they are using are out of date. As examined in the Physician Data deep dive into what the physician workforce crisis means for healthcare marketers in 2026, organizations that have not updated their physician data infrastructure to account for practice consolidation, provider role expansion, and geographic workforce shifts are systematically reaching the wrong people.
Physician licensing data is maintained by 50 separate state licensing boards, each with different standards for what information is collected, how frequently it is updated, and in what format it is available. National Provider Identifier data provides a baseline directory of licensed providers, but NPI records are not reliably updated when physicians change practice location, reduce hours, retire, or shift specialties. Insurance network directories, which should theoretically reflect where physicians are actively practicing, are notoriously inaccurate — in some states, more than 40 percent of provider directory entries contain incorrect or outdated information.
The result is that when a pharmaceutical company is targeting primary care physicians in rural markets, or a medical device manufacturer is trying to reach orthopedic surgeons in PE-owned practice groups, they are working from data that ranges from incomplete to actively misleading.
What good physician workforce data infrastructure looks like
Healthcare organizations that are managing the physician shortage most effectively have invested in data infrastructure that enables them to answer three questions with confidence:
Where are physicians currently located and actively practicing? This requires more than NPI data. It requires regularly updated practice location data, specialty verification, and active status tracking. Platforms like physician-data.com provide current, comprehensive physician contact and specialty data that gives healthcare organizations the intelligence they need to understand the actual workforce landscape in their geography.
Where are physicians likely to be in three to five years? This requires retirement risk modeling — understanding which portions of the physician workforce are approaching traditional retirement age by specialty and geography — combined with pipeline analysis showing how many residents in each specialty are completing training and where they are likely to practice.
Who is actually making healthcare purchasing decisions? In an era of corporate consolidation and expanding non-physician provider roles, this question cannot be answered by physician-only databases. It requires integrated data on practice ownership structures, advanced practice provider rosters, and organizational hierarchies.
The locum tenens signal
One of the most revealing data points about the state of physician workforce planning is the explosive growth of the locum tenens market. A Doximity poll found that more than 63 percent of U.S. physicians report that they are either already working in locum tenens or considering it within the next five years. With physician vacancies taking an average of 224 days to fill through permanent recruitment, locum tenens has become a primary — not supplemental — component of healthcare workforce strategy.
The locum tenens data also signals something important about physician preferences. Physicians are increasingly choosing flexible practice models because traditional full-time employment arrangements are not meeting their needs for autonomy and work-life balance. Healthcare organizations that do not account for this preference shift in their recruitment and retention data will continue to lose physicians to more flexible alternatives.
The bottom line
The physician shortage is a structural problem that will take decades to fully address through increases in training capacity and pipeline development. But many of the most damaging near-term effects — care gaps in specific specialties and geographies, costly locum tenens dependence, avoidable physician turnover, and misdirected marketing spend — are addressable with better data and smarter workforce planning today.
The healthcare organizations and the vendors that serve them that will navigate the next decade most successfully are the ones that invest now in current, comprehensive, regularly updated physician and provider data. Not because data is sufficient to solve the shortage. But because without it, every other intervention — recruitment, retention, outreach, program design — is operating on a map that no longer matches the territory.
