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Healthcare Insights

Top 25 medical specialties by number of healthcare providers

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of patients experienced healthcare delays, some of which were caused by healthcare providers leaving the workforce in droves. While COVID may be with us for a very long time, the reality is that practice of healthcare has been changed forever.  Whether you are healthcare practitioner, a healthcare system executive, or someone who provides goods and services to the healthcare industry, it’s critical to understand how many healthcare providers are practicing across common medical specialties, including internal medicine physicians, physician assistants and a variety of physician subspecialties.

We analyzed more than 2.5 million healthcare providers tracked in the Definitive Healthcare PhysicianView product to identify the number of healthcare providers by medical specialty.   Nurses and providers without an identified specialty were excluded from our analysis.

The table below lists the top medical specialties by number of active healthcare providers.

Top 25 medical specialties ranked by number of providers

RankMedical specialty titleNumber of healthcare providersExplore dataset
1Therapy179,853Explore
2Physician Assistant 154,216Explore
3Internal Medicine127,065Explore
4Family Practice 125,614Explore
5Anesthesiology114,927Explore
6Social Worker95,523Explore
7Surgery95,477Explore
8Psychology68,155Explore
9Pediatric Medicine67,331Explore
10Emergency Medicine62,217Explore
11Chiropractic59,162Explore
12Psychiatry50,646Explore
13Optometry49,681Explore
14Radiology46,648Explore
15Obstetrics/Gynecology46,639Explore
16Cardiology34,455Explore
17Hospitalist29,389Explore
18Neurology21,601Explore
19Ophthalmology21,448Explore
20Oncology18,680Explore
21Podiatry18,547Explore
22Gastroenterology18,466Explore
23Pathology16,359Explore
24Dermatology15,154Explore
25Audiology14,525Explore

Fig. 1.  Data is from the Definitive Healthcare PhysicianView product and sourced from proprietary research, the NPI Registry and Physician Compare. Only specialties with at least 100 providers reporting a birth year are included. Data accurate as of July 2022.

What are the most common medical specialties?

The most common medical specialties by healthcare providers were therapists (n=179,853), including subspecialty areas for physical therapy (n=127,203) and occupational therapy(n=28,293), followed by physician assistants (n=157,216) and internal medicine (n=127,065).

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