This analysis synthesizes 5 sources published the week ending Oct 28, 2026. Editorial analysis by the PhysEmp Editorial Team.
A new workforce index says 92% of the 2040 clinician shortage can be closed. The number depends on a quiet assumption: that clinicians, once retained, keep working the hours the model counts. Two pieces of evidence from the last week suggest that assumption deserves more scrutiny than the headline gets.
For readers following the Healthcare Workforce & Labor Market pillar, this is a follow-up to the Covista projection that circulated at the end of September, now tested against fresh data on how physicians actually allocate their time.
What the 92% figure includes
The Covista Healthcare Workforce Index, released Sept. 28 and modeled by Oliver Wyman from more than 60 datasets, projects that the U.S. shortage nearly doubles by 2040 to 2.2 million workers without intervention. It then stacks levers against that gap: expanded training capacity at 25%, reduced burnout and better retention at roughly 25%, nontraditional students at 7%, AI automation of administrative work at up to 37%, new therapeutics at 21%, and care redesign at 13%. Healthcare Dive notes the report offsets AI’s gain by about 18%, since tools that surface unmet needs create more work.
The levers overlap, and the talent levers are modeled in a best-case scenario while the innovation levers use a most-likely one. Covista is also a for-profit healthcare educator, worth remembering when training capacity is the model’s biggest talent lever. None of this makes the analysis wrong. It means the 92% is a ceiling built from favorable assumptions, and the retention lever carries a quarter of it.
A retention lever counts people kept. A shortage is measured in clinical hours delivered. The two diverge exactly when a physician stays employed but cuts back, and no headcount projection records that.
Retained is not the same as full-time
A JAMA Network Open study of 710 physicians who finished training between 2015 and 2024, covered by the AMA this week, measured interest in part-time work over a follow-up of roughly eight years. By year 10, 70.9% of female nonsurgeons and 60.3% of female surgeons were considering it, against 37.1% of male nonsurgeons and 26.9% of male surgeons. Interest rose in every group over time.
The gap between wanting and doing is the telling part. Becker’s Hospital Review reports that 31.2% of female surgeons had actually moved to part-time, roughly half the share considering it, and that women had more than 12 times the odds of making the move after adjustment. The authors point to physician shortages, training debt and cultural stigma as barriers, and call the unmet desire a possible early sign of workforce departure.
That framing matters for the model. If employers cannot offer reduced schedules, some of these physicians will leave clinical work entirely, which is the loss Covista’s retention lever is meant to prevent. If employers do offer them, the physicians stay and total hours fall. Both outcomes shrink supply relative to a full-time assumption; only one shows up as a departure. The AMA’s Tiffani Bell Washington cautioned against treating this as a women’s issue and separated physicians who choose fewer hours from those pushed there because full-time practice became unsustainable.
The other end of the career
Hours are shrinking at one end while exits accumulate at the other. Becker’s reports that about 47% of active physicians are 55 or older, up from 38% in 2007, and that 22.4% were over 65 in 2025, roughly double the share in 2005. About 200 hospitals now require cognitive screening for physicians 70 and older, and a trial over Yale New Haven’s policy, which the EEOC challenged as age discrimination in 2020, began Aug. 27.
Screening policies are meant to protect patients, and the safety case is real. The supply side effect is that, according to the article, many physicians choose to retire rather than be evaluated. The AMA estimate cited there is blunt: if the average retirement age fell by two years, 2036 physician supply would drop by about 40,000. A policy designed around safety becomes a retirement-timing lever, and no workforce model prices it.
Where mainstream coverage falls short
The write-ups of the Covista index reviewed here lead with two numbers, 2040 and 92%, and treat the shortage as a stock of people to be topped up. Coverage of the part-time study frames it mainly as a work-life story. Read together, they describe one labor-market mechanism: effective supply moves with schedules, age-based policies and flexibility, not only with training slots. The pipeline lever is the most visible one, but it is also the slowest to arrive, and it is exposed to the same attrition at the other end.
For physicians weighing a move, the data suggest scheduling flexibility is both in demand among peers and scarce in practice, which makes a written reduced-hours pathway a negotiable term worth asking about before signing. For hospital executives and recruiters, the same gap is a retention opening: an employer that offers a credible part-time track can hold physicians that competitors lose to full exit, and can count the hours rather than the heads.
Numbers to watch
The figure to track is the distance between consideration and adoption. Among female surgeons it stands at 60.3% against 31.2%. If that gap narrows because employers start offering reduced schedules, headcount stays high while hours per physician fall, and projections built on full-time equivalents will look worse than the Covista scenario assumes. If it stays wide, expect the difference to surface as departures from clinical practice. Either way, the 2040 gap is more likely to be settled by scheduling policy and retirement timing than by the next round of training slots alone.
Sources
How to close 92% of the 2040 healthcare workforce gap: report – Becker’s Hospital Review
Clinician shortage to double by 2040 – Healthcare Dive
Which physicians are considering part-time work? – American Medical Association
Many female physicians want fewer hours, but few get them – Becker’s Hospital Review
Health systems’ late-career physician dilemma: Safety vs. supply – Becker’s Hospital Review