Healthcare Insights
Medical specialties with the most locum tenens providers
Medical staffing and recruiting companies help ensure healthcare provider organizations can support patient care with additional clinical staff or required specialties.
In the Definitive Healthcare PhysicianView product, a proprietary algorithm analyzes a physician’s recent billing activity and network affiliations to identify those physicians that are considered locum tenens, or short-term, contract-based healthcare providers.
In addition, our claims-based specialty data categorizes the specialty of healthcare providers beyond self-reported taxonomy codes. Using the Atlas All-Payor Claims Dataset, we can better understand the actual procedures a provider performs and the patients they see to classify their expertise more accurately.
The following list summarizes the claims-based medical specialties of providers in PhysicianView with the most predicted locum tenens. Calendar year 2022 claims were used for the analysis.
| Rank | Claims-based specialty | % of predicted locum tenens providers | Explore dataset |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Family practice | 15.2% | Explore |
| 2 | Internal medicine | 12.7% | Explore |
| 3 | Emergency medicine | 9.8% | Explore |
| 4 | Nephrology | 6.6% | Explore |
| 5 | Nurse practitioner | 6.6% | Explore |
| 6 | Orthopedic surgery | 4.8% | Explore |
| 7 | Diagnostic radiology | 4.7% | Explore |
| 8 | Pediatric medicine | 3.8% | Explore |
| 9 | Obstetrics/gynecology | 3.8% | Explore |
| 10 | Gastroenterology | 3.2% | Explore |
| 11 | Physician assistant | 3.0% | Explore |
| 12 | Hospital medicine | 2.3% | Explore |
| 13 | Cardiology | 2.2% | Explore |
| 14 | Oncology | 1.9% | Explore |
| 15 | Physical therapy | 1.7% | Explore |
| 16 | General surgery | 1.6% | Explore |
| 17 | Urology | 1.4% | Explore |
| 18 | Ophthalmology | 1.1% | Explore |
| 19 | Otolaryngology | 0.9% | Explore |
| 20 | Pulmonology | 0.9% | Explore |
| 21 | Psychiatry | 0.8% | Explore |
| 22 | Geriatric medicine | 0.7% | Explore |
| 23 | Neurology | 0.7% | Explore |
| 24 | Physical medicine and rehabilitation | 0.7% | Explore |
| 25 | Podiatry | 0.6% | Explore |
Fig. 1. Data is from the Definitive Healthcare PhysicianView and Atlas All-Payor Claims products for calendar year 2022. Claims data is sourced from multiple medical claims clearinghouses in the United States and is updated monthly. Accessed March 2023.
Which medical specialties have the most locum tenens providers?
Primary care doctors – family practice and internal medicine physicians – make up the highest percentage of predicted locums tenens providers analyzed. The two specialties are among the most popular by total providers and the most reported by medical school graduates.
Family practice and internal medicine doctors are also some of the specialties most impacted by physician staffing shortages – an estimated 28,000 primary care doctors dropped out of the workforce in 2021.
Emergency medicine doctors, nephrologists, and nurse practitioners (NPs) are also among the most popular predicted locum tenens specialties.
Additional medical specialties in the top 10 include:
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