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Med students probably dream of working in that snazzy, prestigious academic medical center in Boston or San Francisco, but it turns out that physicians in more rural areas like Montana and South Dakota actually make more money, according to startup Doximity.
“High cost areas actually pay less,” said Jeff Tangney, CEO and founder of Doximity. “Medical school teaches the science of medicine, but not the business of medicine.”
The San Francisco-based startup, a LinkedIn for doctors of sorts, crunched numbers on compensation trends and found that physicians in rural areas of the country see an average of $1,500 more in salary each year compared to urban areas.
That’s likely due to issues of supply, said Lauren Lloyd, a spokeswoman for Doximity, which says it has over 400,000 physician members.
“We believe that the higher rural compensation is a result of more of a supply problem. The demand for doctors stays relatively consistent with population, with some exceptions,” she said. “However, in areas with a lower supply of physicians either due to the number of training programs or the desirability of the location, we’re seeing that those areas are paying higher wages to meet their demand.”
Doximity also found the most in-demand specialties are emergency medicine, family medicine, occupational medicine and psychiatry, based on the number of job listings for those areas. The compensation for those areas was greatest in Texas, Florida and Minnesota, while physicians in Massachusetts, New York and California reported the lowest salaries in the specialty.
The figures come from Doximity’s launch of its Career Navigator, which aims to bring more transparency to medical careers. To do so, it leveraged shared information from more than 18,000 anonymous physician members that was collected over four months. A map was developed for the entire country, down to the county level, for trends on 48 specialties.
It found, for example, that an anesthesiologist in Massachusetts would on average increase their salary 61 percent by relocating to Wisconsin. It also noted that the most in-demand specialties are
In addition, when a new specialist comes to a town of 100,000, other specialists in that same town make $1,500 less in a year. Physicians in populations with a typically high rate of obesity also get paid slightly more than those in healthier areas, according to Doximity. And internists working in private practice make an estimated 12 percent (or $28,000) more than those working in academic or government institutions.
“Our data does show that as you add more physicians per capita, you see a decrease in compensation. We also see that areas with high physician shortages, correlate with lower wages as well,” Lloyd said. “The areas receiving higher wages do not necessarily have a shortage of physicians, likely because they’re paying higher wages to meet their demand.