Florida’s physician workforce in 2023
by By Jarrod Fowler, MHA, FMA Director of Healthcare Policy and Innovation |  Nov. 15, 2023
The Florida Department of Health recently released the 2023 Physician Workforce Annual Report. This report provides information about the state of the physician workforce in Florida, including practice patterns, geographical distributions, Medicare acceptance rates and more. A full copy of the report can be found here. Key findings, taken from the report, are presented below.

Key findings include:

Of the physicians renewing their licenses and responding to the survey, 71.82% (56,769) said they were providing direct patient care in Florida. With respect to those physicians:
 
  • Statewide, 35.82% of Florida’s 67 counties have a per capita rate of 10 or fewer physicians per 10,000 population.
  • Physicians providing direct patient care are generally concentrated in populous counties and within large, urban population centers. Survey results indicated that 98.11% of physicians work in urban counties while 1.89% work in Florida’s 31 rural counties. In all of the rural counties, at least 20% of physicians are primary care providers.
  • Among physicians, 34.17% (19,396) are age 60 and older (page 10).
  • For physicians under age 40, the percentage of female physicians is 46.21%.
  • The top three specialty groups for physicians providing direct patient care in Florida are internal medicine at 28.11% (15,724), family medicine at 14.64% (8,191), and pediatrics at 7.89% (4,413).
  • Primary care physicians account for 31.63% of physicians providing direct patient care.
  • In Florida, 77.45%(40,132) of physicians practice in an office setting and 20.17%(10,451) practice in a hospital (page 18).
  • Survey results indicate 75.28% of physicians report they accept patients with Medicare (page 30) and 64.13% report they accept patients with Medicaid.
  • A total of 9.56% (5,429) of physicians providing direct patient care plan to retire in the next five years.
  • Just over 2% (1,181) of physicians practice in Florida’s rural counties. Over the last ten years, the number of physicians who have indicated, through the survey, that they provide direct patient care in Florida has increased. However, there was a slight decrease between 2022 and 2023.