How millennials are changing medicine
Key Takeaways
Millennials represent more than a third of the current U.S. workforce, according to thePew Research Center. And according to anErnst & Young report, Millennials will constitute 75% of the global workforce by 2025. How, then, are millennial doctors changing medicine?
To get some perspective on how Millennials are changing the practice of medicine, we turned to Kurt Mosley, vice president of strategic alliances at the physician staffing firm Merritt Hawkins. In his role, Mosley spends time face-to-face with new doctors and interacts a great deal with more established physicians. Millennials, Mosley says, are meeting the shifting demands of medicine and changing medicine itself.
The changing face of medicine
Millennials are increasing the diversity of the medical profession, Mosley says, and the future of medicine is looking increasingly female.
“There are more females in the physician marketplace than ever,” Mosley says. “The proportions used to be something like 12 males to 1 female. Now, it’s about 33-34% female, most of whom are Millennials.”
While physician employers may begin to see more diversity in their doctors, they shouldn’t expect those doctors to stick around. Generation X and Baby Boomer doctors tend to want job security. Millennials, according to Mosley, are more exploratory. They want their ideal job. As a result, many change jobs between 2-3 years after obtaining their first position, Mosley says.
While more of what Mosley calls traditionalist doctors might be tempted to point their fingers at an apparent lack of commitment among Millennial physicians, Mosley says that Millennials are in some ways responding better than traditionalist doctors to the changing demands of medicine.
Millennials meet the need for value-based care
According to Mosley, Millennials excel at practicing value-based medicine.
“Millennials were raised with a lot of structure,” Mosley says. “They thrive in systems where they know exactly how they’re going to be judged, how to play within a given matrix.”
Modern medical demands, such as patient satisfaction, coding, population health, preventative health, and counseling, come more naturally to Millennial physicians than the traditionalists. And because Millennials are increasingly employed physicians — not self-employed small business owners — they have a healthy amount of distance between themselves and their communities.