Physician Shortage Trend: Urology

In our work, physician shortages within a given specialty can impact the fair market value and commercial reasonableness of the compensation arrangements for those specialists. One such specialty experiencing a demonstrated physician shortage across many regional markets is urology.

Urologists are physicians who specialize in treating conditions that affect the urinary tract, which includes the kidneys, bladder, ureters, and urethra. According to the American Urological Association, over 60% of all US counties don't have a practicing urologist as per capita urologists have declined and the average age of practicing physicians in the specialty has grown to be one of the oldest. The documented shortage has been attributed to increasing retirements and fewer medical school graduates choosing to specialize in the field. To learn more about the urologist shortage, we looked at online job postings seeking urologists.

Urologist Job Postings

DocCafe advertises itself as the top job board for physicians. The site has 107,137 physician openings listed, 88,300 of which were posted within the past 30 days. Out of those 107,137 listings, 2,910 are looking for urologists across all subspecialties. Considering that there are 14,176 active urologists in the U.S. (according to the American Urological Association's 2023 Annual Census), this is a significant number of open positions.

Urology Specialties

The DocCafe website reports openings for three urology subspecialties: general urology, urogynecology (a subspecialty of both urology and gynecology), and pediatric urology.

Urology Jobs Across the Country

Out of all the urologist subspecialties, the states with the most urology listings are Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida, while Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Delaware have one to two listings on the site.

Urologist Work Environment

Most of the open positions list hospitals as the primary work environment while a small minority are telemedicine.

Urologist Modality

Each urology modality utilizes different techniques to diagnose and treat patients. Among the 2,910 listed openings, the most frequently mentioned modality is cystoscopy, while the fewest mentions are CT scans.

Date of Posted Listings

Of the total 2,910 posted urologist listings (all subspecialties) 2,467 were posted in the last 30 days (~85%), and 300 were posted in the last 24 hours (~10%).