'Primary Care Physician Numbers See Decline for Medicare New Patient Visits'

 The number of primary care physicians (PCPs) available for new Medicare patient visits decreased by nearly 25% from 2013 to 2021, whereas the number of advanced practice clinicians available for new visits increased by around 90% during the same period.

METHODOLOGY:

• Researchers conducted a repeated cross-sectional study using Medicare fee-for-service claims from 2013 to 2021 to assess trends in availability of primary care clinicians.
• The study included PCPs and advanced practice clinicians who submitted at least 50 outpatient visit evaluation and management codes annually.
• Clinicians were categorized as available for new visits if they billed more than 11 new visit codes for Medicare beneficiaries each year.
• The analysis captured per-beneficiary counts of new visits and the percentage of clinicians available for new visits, stratified by clinician type and year.

TAKEAWAY:

• The number of PCPs available for new Medicare patient visits decreased by 24.9% from 2013 to 2021, and the number of advanced practice clinicians available for new visits increased by 91.4% during the same period.
• A total of 75,140 PCPs and 12,768 advanced practice clinicians were available for new visits in 2013.
• PCPs available for new visits decreased from 20.0 to 15.5 per 10,000 beneficiaries over the time period, and advanced practice clinicians available increased from 3.4 to 6.7 per 10,000 beneficiaries.
• The percentage of new patient visits completed by PCPs decreased from 86.1% in 2013 to 69.9% in 2021.

IN PRACTICE:

"The growth in APCs [advanced practice clinicians] available for new patients may only partially mitigate the decline in physicians, possibly leading to barriers, including longer wait times for new patient visits and limited ability to access a new practitioner," the authors of the study wrote. "Without intervention, the supply of new visits for fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries may continue to decline.”

"Their results suggest that APCs will be an important, but likely inadequate, means of increasing access to primary care," experts wrote in an accompanying editorial.

SOURCE:

The study was led by Katherine Majzoub Morgan, MD, MPP, of the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. It was published online January 20, 2026, as a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine.

LIMITATIONS: 

The study focused on the fee-for-service Medicare population.

DISCLOSURES:

This study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging and the Health Resources and Services Administration of the US Department of Health and Human Services. One author disclosed receiving grants from the National Institute on Aging during the study. Another author reported receiving personal fees from the Department of Health Care Services, unrelated to this work.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/pcp-numbers-see-decline-new-patient-visits-2026a10002cc