Keisa Bennett, MD, MPH, Julie Phillips, MD, MPH, and Bridget Teevan, MS
Reasons for the shortage of primary care physicians in regions designated as Health Professional Shortage Areas and steps that medical schools and state and federal policymakers can take to alleviate the shortage.
Erwin C. Wang, MHA, Megan Prior, Jenny M. Van Kirk, Stephen A. Sarmiento, Margaret M. Burke, MS, Christine Oh, MS, Eileen S. Moore, MD, and Stephen Ray Mitchell, MD
Policies and systems are slow to resolve structural disparities in access to insurance coverage and health care, but physicians can act now.
Physicians have an ethical responsibility to be functionally literate in health statistics and able to explain information such as a test’s positive predictive value to their patients.
Residency programs should include a system composed of night float teams, wide cross-coverage, and effective communication at the time of patient hand-off in order to maintain an 80-hour work week.
The primary goals of the current medical licensing exams are to insure clinical competence, but questions have been raised as to the efficiency of these exams.
Although there are various rules to the National Residency Match Program, many programs try to avoid the rules and fill residency positions through other avenues.