FPs in Demand by Hospitals, Medical Groups

Hospitals are looking high and low for family physicians. "More hospitals are actively engaged in recruiting family physicians than any other type of physician," says a recent report from Merritt, Hawkins & Associates, a leading physician search firm with headquarters in Irving, Texas.

Many hospitals do their own recruiting of family physicians and use Merritt, Hawkins only to recruit harder-to-find physicians, says the report, (PDF file: 12 pages / 199 KB. More about PDFs.) which focuses on the firm's searches on behalf of medical groups, hospitals and other health care organizations. For the period from April 1, 2004, to March 31, 2005, physicians most frequently sought by medical organizations and hospitals were, in descending order, cardiologists, radiologists, orthopedic surgeons, internists, family physicians and general surgeons.

The report notes increases in the past few years in searches for general internists and family physicians. "These increases indicate a steady resurgence in two areas of primary care recruitment as hospitals and other health care providers seek to meet the needs of changing demographics and/or maintain patient referral networks," says the report.

Salaries for family physicians ranged from $125,000 to $200,000 in 2004-05, with an average salary of $150,000, according to the report. The 2004-05 salary levels were about $5,000 higher than comparable figures for 2003-04. Average income offers for family physicians by geographic region were $145,000 in the Northeast, $152,000 in the Southeast, $151,000 in the Midwest and $144,000 in the West, says the report.

"I'd like to think this report indicates hospitals and medical groups have a growing appreciation of the importance of a strong primary care base for their local health care systems," said Perry Pugno, M.D., director of the AAFP Division of Medical Education. "Perhaps hospitals and medical groups are recognizing the cost-effectiveness and favorable outcomes of primary care compared with subspecialty care, as outcomes research has documented."

Pugno referred to "The Effects of Specialist Supply on Populations' Health: Assessing the Evidence," a Web exclusive that Health Affairs posted last year. In that article, Barbara Starfield, M.D., M.P.H., a professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and her co-authors used data from U.S. counties to show a need for more primary care physicians instead of subspecialists.

"The greater the supply of primary care physicians, the lower the total and heart disease mortality rates," say Starfield and her colleagues. "From a population viewpoint, there is considerable evidence for the benefits (on health outcomes) of an increase in supply of primary care physicians and no evidence for a similar effect for specialists."