Closing the Gap in Primary Care: A Systematic Review and Interpretation

Objective: The United States faces a health care provider shortage yearly in many areas of the country, but most of all the rural areas are most impacted. The aim of this paper is 2-fold: To understand the factors that drive a medical student’s specialty choice through a systematic review article and how government initiatives consider what is important to students, to understand how other clinicians can help close the gap in primary care in the United States and what policies or barriers prevent them from doing so. Methods: This paper looks at nationally collected data, as well as meta-analysis reviews on the topic to help the reader better understand the issue of health care provider shortages. Conclusion: We must change the way we look at primary care and rural medicine. Rather than investing money in avenues that yield little return on investment, we as a nation should strategically fund and advance the scope of practice for rural medicine to make it attractive and competitive for clinicians to pursue. Being in a large deficit of clinical providers in general in our country, we must try to find new pathways to grow coverage in rural areas before our health care system is no longer equitable.