Requests for Radiology Subsidies Could be Related to Physician Shortage

We have recently noticed a significant uptick in the number of private radiology groups seeking subsidies from their affiliated hospitals. Conventional wisdom says a shortage of radiologists is driving this phenomenon. To learn more about the shortage, we looked at online job listings for radiology. We found a massive number of open positions across the nation and across modalities.

Radiologist Job Postings

DocCafe advertises itself as the top job board for physicians. The site has 107,077 physician jobs listed, 88,457 of which were posted within the past 30 days. Out of those 107,077 listings, 3,736 are seeking radiologists across all subspecialties. Considering that there are 27,197 active radiologists in the U.S. (according to the 2022 Physician Specialty Data Report published by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)), this is a significant number of open positions.

Radiology Specialties

The DocCafe website lists openings for 14 radiology subspecialties, with the top subspecialties being general radiology, interventional radiology, and breast radiology.

Radiology Jobs Across the Country

Across all subspecialties, population roughly correlates to the relative number of postings, i.e., the states with the highest number of radiology listings have higher populations while smaller population states have many fewer listings.

Radiologist Work Environment

Most job listings on the website provide services at hospitals while the fewest are for telemedicine. Nearly 30% of the listings have overlapping work environments, meaning they may provide services in two or all three of the listed patient settings.

General Radiologist Modality

Each radiology modality utilizes different medical imaging technology to diagnose and treat patients. There are 2,527 general radiology listings on the site. All of them mention the use of ultrasound for medical imaging, while less than 200 mention the use of fluoroscopy and X-ray for medical imaging.

Date of Posted Listings

Out of the 3,736 posted radiologist listings (all subspecialties), 2,960 were posted in the last 30 days (~80%), and 511 were posted in the last 24 hours (~14%).

BFMV provides consultations and valuations of fair market value, volume or value standard, and commercial reasonableness for radiology and other healthcare arrangements of all kinds across the US. Contact us for more information.