Why Employed Physician Models Still Require Workforce Planning
August 22, 2025
Even employed physician models require active workforce planning to ensure access, growth, and compliance stay on track.
Compliance Services
Performance Transformation
Hiring doesn’t mean you’re covered. Even with a full roster of employed physicians, hospitals risk care gaps, misaligned growth, and compliance pitfalls without a clear workforce plan.
Why Employed Models Still Require Workforce Planning
Physician employment is increasingly the norm in healthcare delivery systems. But as care models evolve and reimbursement continues to shift, simply having employed providers doesn’t mean your organization is meeting community needs—or operating efficiently.
A Physician Needs Assessment (PNA) serves as a strategic tool for evaluating service line capacity, specialty alignment, succession planning, and population growth trends.
When a PNA Changes the Game: 3 Examples
- A suburban hospital with a large employed primary care group wants to launch a specialty access initiative. The PNA revealed gaps in cardiology and orthopedics, preventing a misaligned expansion.
- A rural system is hiring aggressively in response to population growth, but a PNA showed the highest community demand was actually for OB/GYN and general surgery—areas previously deprioritized.
- A hospital with high physician turnover used a PNA to identify workload imbalances and looming retirements, leading to a revised recruitment strategy.
The Strategic ROI of a Physician Needs Assessment
A PNA is more than a compliance document. It provides insight into:
- Where your physicians are needed most
- How many providers are appropriate by specialty
- Whether existing care teams are meeting access and outcome goals
This kind of analysis helps your leadership team make better decisions about recruitment, resource allocation, and long-term sustainability.
What to Include in a Comprehensive Assessment
An effective PNA should include:
- Demographic and utilization data
- Physician-to-population ratios
- Retention, turnover, and retirement risk
- Community input and market trends
- Regulatory and compliance considerations
Working with a third-party team also ensures objectivity and defensibility—particularly when aligning incentives or preparing for audits.
Even if you’ve shifted to an employed physician model, workforce planning is far from automatic. A Physician Needs Assessment helps you move from assumption to strategy—backed by data, documentation, and a clear path forward.
What to Do Next
📘 Download our Physician Needs Documentation Checklist to support compliant, strategic recruitment.
💼 Explore our PNA services to see how we help with long-term workforce planning.
📅 Talk to a Coker consultant about a custom Physician Needs Assessment.
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