BOSTON – The Physicians Foundation has awarded a two-year $750K grant to aid in the development of a Web-based projection model that will be designed to be continually updated with new data to track ongoing physician workforce needs across the country.

The nonprofit organization awarded the grant to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in July.

With the introduction of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which seeks to extend insurance to more than 30 million people, there is expected to be a significant influx of new patients. The grant is aimed at giving policymakers and health providers a free resource to access real-time data on the locations where physician shortages are most problematic at the local, state and national levels.

Erin. P. Fraher, who heads the project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says the model is unique for a couple reasons. “We are proposing an open-source model that would be accessible online,” she says. Usually projections are based on proprietary models that don’t allow you to, “get under the hood,” and are usually static, which prevents users from querying or modifying the data.

The design of the tool also makes it unique, says Fraher. As they develop the model UNC will receive input from a clinical advisory board made up of eight to 10 physicians across the United States. “Having that clinical input will make the model much more relevant to the frontline physicians,” she says.

UNC will use data from a wide variety of sources, including the American Medical Association and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Once the data is assembled, the team will work with the Physicians Foundation and the clinical advisory group to develop a model that enables users to estimate physician supply and demand within a set geography and/or specialty. Users will also be able to incorporate a multitude of scenarios to evaluate physician workforce needs, and the sensitivity of projections affected by policy changes.

Alan Plummer, Physicians Foundation board member and chair of the grants committee, says the Physicians Foundation thought an important question that needed to be answered today was “What is the number of physicians who are in practice now and what specialties and subspecialties do they represent and how does that fit with the needs of the American public?”

He says the development of a tool that can answer these questions is why the Physicians Foundation awarded UNC the grant.

 “We are trying to get a feel of what doctors want to know and anticipate their concerns,” says Thomas Ricketts, professor, Health Policy and Management at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and deputy director, Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. Ricketts will serve as an investigator on the development of the project along with Fraher.

Ricketts sees the projection model as a valuable tool for not only predicting how bad the physician shortage could get, but also for getting stakeholders to discuss what options are available.

“A lot of people tend to think of the physician supply in different buckets, but a substantial portion of the physician supply is trained to do multiple things, the question is what are they going to be assigned to?’’ He hopes the model will get the ball rolling on these types of issues.

UNC plans to pilot the model to physicians on the clinical advisory board and the organizations they represent. They also hope to demo it at physician conferences and get critical feedback from doctors, says Fraher.

She says the model will be turned over to the Physicians Foundation, which is still in discussion about how it will live on beyond the grant.

Fraher says they are open to suggestions from providers about the model via e-mail at fraher@schsr.unc.edu.