Findings Address How Access, Technology and Clinician Support Varies Across Rural, Urban and Suburban Settings

LocumTenens.com and the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) today announced the results of joint research from a national survey of medical group and health system leaders across geographic settings to gauge the state of current and anticipated organizational challenges; surface strategies for recruitment and retention, telehealth and emerging technologies like AI; and share best practices motivating performance and care outcomes.

Future-Forward Strategies for Rural and Urban Care Delivery Challenges is the newly released report summarizing the results of more than 200 online surveys conducted in July 2024 among physician practices, divided equally between urban, suburban and rural locations.

“Our survey confirms that the top three challenges facing clinicians, regardless of where they are located, continue to be clinical support staffing, financial stability, and physician and advanced practice provider (APP) recruitment, underscoring the need for a renewed approach to workforce planning that enhances patient access and outcomes,” said Chris Franklin, president of LocumTenens.com. “Flexible workforce models that fluctuate with patient load, include telehealth, and utilize APPs to extend care is a strategy that can be applied and customized across all geographies to help address these issues.”

Breaking participant responses to the survey down by geographic location revealed further distinctions about the major challenges facing medical practices today:

• Healthcare leaders in rural settings reported their most significant challenge is with physician and APP recruitment (56%) — approximately double the challenge noted from their urban colleagues (28%) and suburban practice leaders (30%).
• Healthcare leaders in urban settings largely align with the national trends around staffing and concerns around financial sustainability, but they have slightly higher concerns with patient access and clinical support staffing compared to other settings. They also reported more challenges with facility upgrades and expansion.
• Suburban healthcare leaders report much more difficulty with health IT infrastructure and security than their colleagues in rural and urban settings.

“These macro trends — staffing shortages, stagnant reimbursement and a flurry of new technologies — are universally top of mind for practice leaders, and they haven’t changed significantly in recent years,” said Halee Fischer-Wright, MD, MMM, FAAP, FACMPE, president and chief executive officer at MGMA. “This report tells us that different approaches are necessary to appropriately update staffing and operations in rural, suburban and urban care settings to meet the growing needs of patients and the evolving realities of a labor-competitive, technology-driven market.”

Today’s medical practices are grappling with finding the right people, technology and workflows, most of which appear to agree that telehealth, AI, new APP roles, and improvements to their organizations’ culture and retention efforts are core strategies. But practices vary in how far along the path they are. As a result, the research indicates that the healthcare industry should expect some of those paths to diverge to best meet the unique needs of the populations these organizations serve. For example:

• Most organizations offer telehealth services, and among those that do, 43% report improved access and wait times.
• When it comes to integrating tools like AI, 74% of urban practices are utilizing it versus 55% of suburban and 53% of rural practices.
• More than seven in 10 (71%) of surveyed healthcare leaders anticipate adding new APP roles in the next five years, largely still centered on independently managing less complex cases and handling routine and non-urgent visits.
• Suburban and rural practices outpace urban settings in meeting the top three priorities of physicians — competitive salary, work-life balance and flexible schedules — while urban tops the survey for geographic desirability.

To learn more, download the full report here: Future-Forward Strategies for Rural and Urban Care Delivery Challenges.

About LocumTenens.com

LocumTenens.com specializes in optimizing healthcare staffing strategies with flexible, hybrid and temporary placement of physicians, advanced practitioners and psychologists through both onsite and telehealth services. As operators of the locum tenens industry’s most-visited job board, LocumTenens.com connects healthcare organizations with medical professionals to help ensure patients have access to quality care. Founded in 1995, LocumTenens.com is the largest provider of locum tenens services in the U.S., and a leader in the healthcare staffing industry, placing clinicians who deliver care to more than ten million patients in over 4,000 healthcare facilities. Headquartered in Atlanta, LocumTenens.com is a Jackson Healthcare^® company.

About MGMA

Founded in 1926, the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) is the nation’s largest association focused on the business of medical practice management. MGMA consists of 15,000 group medical practices ranging from small private medical practices to large national health systems representing more than 350,000 physicians. MGMA helps over 60,000 medical practice leaders and the healthcare community solve the business challenges of running practices so that they can focus on providing outstanding patient care. Specifically, MGMA helps its members innovate and improve profitability and financial sustainability, and it provides the gold standard on industry benchmarks such as physician compensation. The association also advocates extensively on its members’ behalf on national regulatory and policy issues. To learn more, go to MGMA.com or follow us on LinkedIn, X and Facebook.

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