Reforming Graduate Medical Education to Address the Healthcare Workforce Shortage: A Conversation with Dr. David Goodman (November 14th)

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It's estimated in the next few years the Affordable Care Act will add 25 million Americans to the health care insurance rolls.  In addition, 10,000 Americans age into Medicare every day.  Current estimates by the Health Resources and Services Administration and others show the country already has a shortage of health care providers, particularly primary care physicians, and the shortage is projected to grow substantially worse by 2025.   Since we can neither meet the demand nor improve supply without changes or improvements to medical workforce training what then can be done to reform federally-funded graduate medical education (GME), particularly since GME policy has been frozen since 1997.   

During this 17 minute interview Dr. Goodman discusses the adequacy of the current health care workforce, what can be done in the near term to improve supply particularly to reduce the maldistribution of providers, policy alternatives he is recommending to improve (or incent) provider supply via changes to federal funding of GME and how (any) reform to GME can avoid the consequence of more physicians simply accelerating health care spending without improving healthcare outcomes or population health.  (Please note: Dr. Goodman's comments are his own.)     

Dr. David C. Goodman is a Professor of Pediatrics, the Co-Principle Investigator of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care and leads the Institute for Health Policy and Clinic Practice at Dartmouth.  His primary research interest is the relationship of outcomes to health workforce supply and its implications for health workforce policy.  He also leads and mentors a wide range of projects investigating the causes and consequences of variation in health care capacity and utilization. Dr. Goodman is the co-founder of the Wennberg International Collaborative, a research network that advances the study of unwarranted medical practice variation.   He is the author of numerous research publications and serves on several editorial boards.  Dr. Goodman was graduated from SUNY, Syracuse with a MD degree, he did his medical training at Johns Hopkins and earned a MS in epidemiology from Dartmouth.

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