A Pragmatic Approach to Identifying and Profiling Primary Care Clinicians and Primary Care Practices in the USA

There are no consistent data on US primary care clinicians and primary care practices owing to the lack of standard methods to identify them, hampering efforts in primary care improvement.

We develop a pragmatic framework that identifies primary care clinicians and practices in the context of the US healthcare system, and applied the framework to the IQVIA OneKey Healthcare Professional database to identify and profile primary care clinicians and practices in the USA.

Our framework prescribes sequential steps to identify primary care clinicians by cross-examining clinician specialties and organizational affiliations, and then identify primary care practices based on organization types and presence of primary care clinicians. Applying this framework to the 2021 IQVIA data, we identified 365,751 physicians with a primary specialty in primary care, and after excluding those who further specialized (24%), served as hospitalists (5%), or worked in non-primary care settings (41%), we determined that 179,369 (49%) of them were actually practicing primary care. We identified 287,506 nurse practitioners and 134,083 physician assistants and determined that 88,574 (31%) and 29,781 (22%), respectively, were delivering primary care. We identified 94,489 primary care practices, and found that 45% of them were with one primary care physician, 15% had two physicians, 12% employed nurse practitioners or physician assistants only, and 19% employed both primary care physicians and specialists.

Our approach offers a pragmatic and consistent alternative to the diverse methods currently used to identify and profile primary care workforce and organizations in the USA.