A Perfect Storm is Brewing Within the U.S. Healthcare Workforce: Public Policy, Data, and AI Will Help Us Weather It

Healthcare, arguably, employs one of the most important workforces in the world. It’s critical to the well-being of the country and affects every American throughout their life. However, the U.S. is facing a growing shortage of physicians, advanced practice providers (APPs), and nurses that cannot be addressed with conventional means. Weathering this storm will require a bold, multi-pronged approach encompassing legislative action and a data-informed approach that leverages AI technology to plan, recruit, and realign more efficient care models.  

But first, let’s start with the problem. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, by 2036, the U.S. will be short approximately 86,000 physicians. This supply gap is exacerbated by an aging population of not only high-demand patients but also the providers who care for them. 

Case in point: recent data reveals that the average age of healthcare providers is 54.4 years, in a profession that continues to demand more from its workforce. Even more concerning is that over 23% of active US physicians are already over 65.  Given the aging physician population and the need to care for a growing older patient population, it is no surprise that many industry professionals continue to raise the alarm. 

Workforce expansion policy

It’s encouraging that Congress is trying to solve this problem. Although not yet passed, there is currently bipartisan support in Congress for the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2025. It aims to add 14,000 Medicare physicians over the next seven years. Helpful? Yes. Problem fixed? Not entirely. Even if the bill is passed, there would still be a shortage of 72,000 physicians over the next decade. While increasing residency slots can improve capacity, organizations still need to allocate precious resources to train these individuals. The bill doesn’t address other underlying issues in the healthcare system that contribute to physician shortages, such as provider burnout, inefficiencies in graduate medical education, and a lack of support for retaining doctors in underserved communities.​ 

Leveraging provider data and artificial intelligence to bridge the gap

That leaves another lever to improve efficiency: data and AI. While by no means the single elixir, technology has the potential to dramatically reduce unnecessary workload among healthcare providers. Ambient listening technology has already proven to reduce charting time, giving providers more time with patients and less “pajama time” at home as they try to keep up. This has driven significant improvements in provider satisfaction, resulting in better productivity and capacity. However, big data and AI models are now being used to address this healthcare workforce shortage. These powerful tools can better analyze, recruit, onboard, and optimize an interconnected workforce of specialists, physicians, and APPs.

For years, capturing and using patient data has been at the forefront of healthcare innovation — and rightly so; in this industry, patients come first. But for the people who provide that care — clinicians — harnessing their data for their benefit can be just as powerful. The health systems that best secure and act on this clinician data will be better suited to weather this healthcare workforce shortage, as long as they use the data to:

• Identify workforce gaps: Using national provider data sets and AI to inform short and long-term staffing needs, market supply, and competitive factors necessary to retain and grow staff.

• Expand the candidate pool: Healthcare systems have traditionally relied on internal word-of-mouth referrals, which don’t scale, and on post-and-pray job board marketing, which attracts only a small percentage of qualified candidates. While still a useful part of their strategy, augmenting it with large provider data sets that contain comprehensive information about candidate credentials, practice history, productivity levels, quality, peer networks, and predicted openness to work, combined with AI that automatically finds high-probability matches, is vastly expanding the qualified candidate pools.  

• Use attrition risk to their benefit: Applying AI to evaluate and predict attrition risk can be used both defensively by organizations that seek to connect the dots between demand, tenure, market dynamics, and organizational changes that may compel a provider to make a move. This same technology can be used offensively to identify candidates ripe for the picking. 

• Accelerate onboarding: Resourceful organizations will leverage provider data and AI not only to source candidates but also to streamline the application process for employment and privileges within complex clinical environments. An internal analysis of a recent industry report reveals that reducing onboarding time can save a healthcare organization an average of $1,827 per day, or roughly $9,000 per week, in contribution margin by addressing unmet patient demand. 

• Continuously refine the physician-to-APP ratio: According to a 2023 Census Bureau report, the current ratio of physicians to APPs in the U.S. is about 1.66 physicians for every APP as of 2023-2024. This reflects a major shift over the past five years toward a more balanced and integrated clinician workforce, with APP hires expected to grow significantly over the next decade. Large data models and AI enable planners to analyze these ratios over time, including the impacts on productivity, access, and quality.

It will take a combined effort

No single step will fix the healthcare workforce shortage. Those need bigger picture ideas. But they can help health systems manage the shortage now, especially when utilizing provider data. Clinicians don’t appear out of thin air. They’re an expensive and increasingly rare resource. They take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train. In the near future, and possibly beyond, patient demand is expected to continue to outpace the supply of physicians. For health systems, it will be the survival of the smartest and the most informed. Healthcare has a clinician availability problem. The problem won’t go away. But with a data-backed strategy, health systems can be better prepared to weather this storm

Photo: Herianus, Getty Images

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