Access to Care – Primary Care
This indicator reports the number of primary care physicians per 100,000 population. Doctors classified as “primary care physicians” by the AMA include: General Family Medicine MDs and DOs, General Practice MDs and DOs, General Internal Medicine MDs and General Pediatrics MDs. Physicians age 75 and over and physicians practicing sub-specialties within the listed specialties are excluded. This indicator is relevant because a shortage of health professionals contributes to access and health status issues and is used in the 2025 County Health Rankings.
Note: Data are suppressed for counties with population greater than 2,000 and 0 primary care physicians.
Source
Accessed via County Health Rankings.
Source Description
The Area Health Resource File (AHRF) is a database of information about the U.S. health care system, maintained and released annually by the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The AHRF contains more than 6,000 variables, aggregated for each of the nation’s counties. The ARF contains information on health facilities, health professions, health status, economic activity, health training programs, measures of resource scarcity, and socioeconomic and environmental characteristics. In addition, the basic file contains geographic codes and descriptors which enable it to be linked to many other files and to aggregate counties into various geographic groupings.
The ARF integrates data from numerous primary data sources including: the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, the American Osteopathic Association, the Bureau of the Census, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly Health Care Financing Administration), Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics and the Veteran’s Administration.
For more information, please visit HRSA’s Area Health Resource File website.
Methodology
Data for this indicator are acquired from the 2022-23 Area Health Resource File database. For this indicator, the 2022-23 AHRF reports figures through 2021 from the American Medical Association Physician Masterfiles (Copyright). Doctors classified as “primary care physicians” by the AMA include M.D.s and D.O.s in the fields of: General Family Medicine, General Practice, General Internal Medicineand General Pediatrics. Physicians age 75 and over, resident physicians, and physicians practicing sub-specialties within the listed specialties are excluded. Data are tabulated for physicians practicing office-based patient care only. Non-patient care practitioners include administrators, medical teachers, researchers, etc. Rates are calculated per 100,000 total population using the following formula:
Population figures in the calculation are from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Resident Population Estimates. For detailed source information, please review the information here.
Data Breakouts Available
- Access to Primary Care, Rate (Per 100,000 Pop.) by Year, 2010 through 2021
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