The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has crashed the job market and starting salaries for physicians, according to an annual report tracking physician recruiting trends.
COVID-19 has turned what for years was a robust job market for physicians upside down, according to the report by Coppell-based Merritt Hawkins physician search firm, a company of AMN Healthcare.
Merritt Hawkins’ physician recruiting engagements are down 30 percent since the pandemic surged earlier this year. This is the first time in the firm’s 33-year history that it has experienced demand for physicians drop so substantially, said Travis Singleton, executive vice president with Merritt Hawkins/AMN Healthcare.
“I’ve been doing this for 20-plus years,” Singleton said in an interview with the Dallas Business Journal. “This is the first time we’ve seen a market like this since the late '70s. The doctors went from having 10 or 15 choices of ‘where do I want to work’ to a complete flip-flop, where you may have 10 or 15 applicants for every one job.”
The Dallas-Fort Worth health care market is more dependent than most on elective procedures and direct physician-patient contact, which have been severely restricted because of the clampdown tied to the coronavirus outbreak, Singleton said.
That could cause some physicians to leave the market, he said.
“The longer this goes, the more susceptible Dallas will be, and there are markets that are better, frankly” Singleton said. “Maybe COVID isn’t as bad. Like just up in Oklahoma, they’re seeing utilization (of medical services) pop back up and all of those things.”
The 2020 Review of Physician and Advanced Practitioner Recruiting Incentives tracks a sample of 3,251 physician and advanced practitioner recruiting engagements that the firm conducted from April 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020. The report indicates that the previously robust job market for physicians has softened since the emergence of COVID-19.
The report says that while Merritt Hawkins saw an increase in physician search engagements over the 12-month period ending March 31 of this year, demand for physicians since March 31, as gauged by number of new search engagements, has declined by over 30 percent.
At the same time, the number of physicians contacting Merritt Hawkins about job opportunities has increased.
This has created an opportune market for health care facilities seeking physicians, Singleton said.
The soft job market for physicians is a result of the harsh economic impact COVID-19 has had on the health care industry. Hospitals and health systems lost $200 billion in the first quarter of this year, according to the American Hospital Association. The Medical Group Management Association indicates that physician practice revenue has declined by an average of 55 percent, as patients have been either unable or unwilling to seek medical treatment during the pandemic.
As a result, fewer physician practices and hospitals are seeking physicians as they struggle with lower revenues and focus on treating COVID-19 patients.
The decrease in demand for doctors will be temporary, Singleton said, because the underlying dynamics driving physician supply and demand remain strong. Some of those include a growing and aging population, a limited supply of newly trained physicians, and an aging physician workforce.
“There are some things you just know,” Singleton said. “You know utilization will come back. The underlying trends that are our patient demographics aren’t going away. The 15 percent of our population that drives 35 percent of our utilization, that’s still there.”
