Our Take
The physician shortage narrative is backwards: the system has trained enough doctors to do the work, but has made it administratively impossible for them to deploy where needed.
Why it matters
Hospital leaders and policymakers are spending a decade-long capital bet on expanding residency slots while ignoring the 35% of qualified physicians already trying to leave. Fixing credentialing and scheduling friction is a months-long problem, not a decade-long one, and it directly addresses where doctors say the real friction lives.
Do this week
Healthcare operations teams: audit your credentialing turnaround time against Deloitte's benchmark (64% of physicians flag it as a top workflow blocker) and identify which steps require paper or multiple vendor systems before month-end.
The Data Shows Doctors Wanting to Work More, Not Fewer
According to McKinsey's most recent U.S. physician survey, approximately 35% of physicians say they are likely to leave their current roles in the next five years, with roughly 60% of those expecting to exit clinical practice entirely. That number is often cited as proof of undersupply. The actual story buried in the same data is different: these are trained, credentialed physicians actively leaving the system.
The alternative is happening in parallel. Between 40% and 50% of doctors are picking up additional work outside their primary roles (per reporting in Forbes and other outlets). These physicians are not burned out and looking to escape medicine. They are seeking more hours and being slowed down by process.
A Deloitte survey reinforces where the friction concentrates. Sixty-four percent of physicians identified provider credentialing as one of the biggest opportunities for workflow improvement, alongside prior authorizations and communications with pharmacists. The complaint is not that credentialing exists. The complaint is that it is broken and slow.
Supply Fixes Take a Decade; Distribution Fixes Take Months
The policy response to "shortage" framing is predictable: fund more residency slots, expand medical school enrollment, project long-term deficits, and call for structural reform. Each of these takes years to produce a working physician. A patient needing care today gets no benefit.
A distribution lens inverts the problem. The physicians exist. Removing the administrative barriers preventing them from working where needed is addressable now. McKinsey's data also shows that 51% of physicians identify schedule flexibility as a key retention factor, yet only 59% of workplaces are actively pursuing such enhancements. This gap is not about funding. It is about systems that were built by administrators, not clinicians, and therefore reflect administrative rather than care-delivery priorities.
The result: physicians spend enormous time navigating processes unrelated to medicine while the system claims it cannot find enough doctors.
Where Credentialing Becomes a Competitive Barrier
Healthcare staffing platforms and facility operators have a measurable opportunity to compress credentialing turnaround time. The Deloitte benchmark indicates demand for this change is explicit and widespread across the physician population.
Facilities optimizing scheduling transparency and reducing credentialing cycle time will capture physicians currently bouncing between side gigs and primary roles. Legacy staffing agencies and cumbersome multi-vendor credentialing workflows will face defection pressure from both supply (physicians seeking faster deployment) and demand (facilities seeking to fill local capacity without agency markups).
The diagnostic matters: if healthcare continues to frame this as a supply problem, capital and policy will chase decade-long solutions while the immediate friction—credentialing, scheduling, communications—remains unaddressed. The physicians are there. The system is not set up to use them.