Why hiring more doctors won't solve health care access

It's not just a supply problem, it's a capacity problem

Physicians across the nation know that no matter how hard you and your staff work, there's never quite enough time, access or bandwidth. The conventional solution over the last few years across every level of the industry has been to add more physicians. But after working with health systems and practices managing billions of dollars in physician compensation, I've come to believe we're solving the wrong problem.

The supply challenge has become the common denominator, and it's getting worse: HRSA projects a shortage of 141,160 physician FTEs by 2038, and more than 83 million Americans already live in primary care shortage areas. Compounding this, state legislation and facility bylaws in many areas continue to limit PAs and NPs from practicing at the top of their license. Starting on July 1, 2026 federal impact will strip NP and PA programs of their professional education status and significantly constrain student loan access. Simply put, there will not be enough physicians to hire our way out of this.

But supply is only part of the story. Research suggests that when physicians are in practice, they spend up to half their time on non-clinical tasks, such as prior authorizations, scheduling headaches, billing disputes and administrative follow-ups. This reality points to a capacity problem, and unlike supply, it's one thing that you can actually do something about today.

Where the time actually goes

For most independent practices, the capacity leak goes unnoticed because it accumulates incrementally.

It's the hour lost to an inbox full of prior authorization requests, insurance follow-ups and referral paperwork that arrived after hours. It's the time spent digging through various billing issues that a cleaner workflow would have caught earlier. It's the physician who is technically available but working through a backlog of patient messages, lab result reviews and operational emails that have little to do with direct care and have no end in sight.

When scheduling, staffing and compensation or billing processes aren't connected, and especially when they're running on separate systems, physicians have no clear picture of where time and capacity actually exist. It's become an unfortunate cycle that leaves physicians feeling burned out. And it's not from seeing too many patients.

In fact, according to the AMA's April 2026 report, excessive administrative tasks and ineffective systems top the list of factors physicians say are driving their stress. That eventually leads to where we are today: concerned about the number of doctors in the system, rather than how much physician time is actually available for care.

Three questions to ask about your own practice

To solve this problem, you don't need to implement an enterprise-scale overhaul to begin recovering capacity. However, you do need to address a few foundational issues:

First, identify where most of your physicians' clinical time is actually going: Start by tracking a week of patient hours (and everything else). Physicians spend 49 percent of their office day on EHR and desk work, compared with only 27 percent on direct patient care. Tasks that could be delegated, automated or eliminated are sure to free up physicians' schedules.

Second, do you know which workarounds are costing you the most?: This issue could reveal itself in several ways: It could be the amount of manual data re-entry that's required because the systems were off-sync, or be measured by how often a physician's portal message goes unanswered, thus adding extra admin time. Individually, each feels like a minor time constraint, but collectively, they consume hours that could have been spent on patients. When you put a number to what these workarounds cost in time and dollars each month, it tends to be the wake-up call that drives real change.

Lastly, are your systems actually connected?: If your scheduling, admin platforms and financial data live in separate places, you're operating with an incomplete picture of how your clinicians are actually spending their time. Integration is how you gain visibility into where inefficiencies are hiding.

Adding providers won't fix a broken process

When it comes down to it, if your practice has these underlying time-management inefficiencies, adding another physician only scales them. And in an environment where PAs and NPs are increasingly constrained by ongoing state-to-federal legislation changes and limited training pipelines, the answer isn't simply to recruit more of any provider type into a broken workflow. The practices improving access today are the ones redesigning their care teams with the right people in the right roles, ensuring they are supported by technology and processes that actually work.

We recognize that the physician shortage is real and will require long-term solutions as we prepare for the years ahead. However, to combat this and sustain your practice for the future, start by addressing the capacity problem in your practice, and remember that the good news is it's solvable right now. So, before you post the next job opening, it's worth asking: "Are your systems enabling your physicians to fully use the capacity they already have?"

Bharat Sundaram is the CEO of Hallmark, Healthcare's Workforce Operating System designed to help health systems and large medical groups nationwide optimize scheduling, staffing and compensation across their physician enterprise. Built by operators who have lived and led inside health systems, Hallmark pairs purpose-built technology with hands-on expertise to ensure that workforce strategies translate into measurable results and high-quality patient care.