Dive Brief:
- Young doctors seem more attracted to roles as hospital-employed physicians than starting their own practices, according to a piece in the Kansas City Star; in the Kansas City area, 55 percent of physicians are now employed by hospitals, according to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City.
- This squares with findings of a 2011 survey by recruitment firm Merritt Hawkins, which reported that senior medical residents rated hospital employment as their top career choice, with only 1 percent of new doctors saying that they wanted their own practice.
- Particularly given the debt that they carry coming out of medical school, it's hardly surprising that they'd prefer to work in well-paid hospitalist jobs; a starting hospitalist earns about $200,000 a year, while office-based physicians earn about $150,000 per year.
Dive Insight:
Seldom in the last few decades of medicine have physicians faced the business challenges they face today, including not only internal operations problems like gearing up for ICD-10, but also responding to the hospital and health system mergers afoot which are shifting the ground underneath their feet rather quickly. When you toss in that hospitals are better paid than office-based physicians, taking a hospital-based job must seem like a no-brainer to many young doctors.