How to Determine the Need for MDS by Specialty (Medicinae Doctor‪)‬

THE FISCAL INCENTIVES INHERENT IN MANAGED CARE, and the desire by medical groups and hospitals to protect their income, will force them to commit to more detailed analyses of their physician manpower needs by clinical specialty. These reports will recommend, depending on the clinical discipline, whether to add physicians or close their medical staffs to other doctors. Undertaking such studies are more critical than ever before, due to the increasing supply of qualified specialists seeking hospital privileges and the growth in enrollment of HMOs and other similar arrangements. Although past debates about appropriate medical staff credentialing frequently related to "due process," the focus of these discussions are predicted to shift in the future toward the numbers--whether the hospital has an inadequate, sufficient, or excess number of physicians available by specialty to appropriately serve its community. Or, to a somewhat similar question of whether an HMO has the suitable number of doctors by specialty in its closed panel to appropriately meet the patient care needs of its subscribers.