Health systems are hiring more advanced practice providers to meet growing demands for care, particularly in the outpatient setting.
Last fall, a report from healthcare consulting firm Kaufman Hall found organizations that leverage a higher percent of APPs in their respective workforces increasingly outperform peers on productivity and compensation metrics.
"Our recommendation is that clients look at how they are employing APPs as a mix with the physicians because there's a lot more of them out in the market right now than there are physicians," Lance Robinson, managing director and practice leader of performance improvement at the firm previously told Becker's.
Seven numbers and trends to know about APP workforce growth:
Growth
1. Nurse practitioner jobs are expected to grow 46% by 2031, making it the fastest-growing occupation in the country, according to projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Physician assistant jobs are projected to increase by nearly 30% in the same period.
2. More nurse practitioners entered the healthcare workforce in 2020 than physicians. That year, about 36,000 NPs joined the workforce, alongside nearly 10,000 PAs and 2,600 certified registered nurse anesthesiologists. Together, they made up more than 60% of providers entering the workforce.
3. Increasingly, health systems are adding APPs to their executive teams. At least four health systems this year have created executive positions specifically for APPs or added them to their leadership structures. In August, Cleveland Clinic named Melissa Stoudmire, MSN, as its inaugural vice president of advanced practice providers — a role in which she'll lead more than 3,600 NPs, PAs and clinical nurse specialists. The creation of the position followed years of consistent APP employment growth at the system, leaders told Becker's.
Compensation
4. Nurse practitioner pay is increasing as demand grows. The average starting salary for NPs grew nearly 9% year over year from 2023 to 2024, according to AMN Healthcare's latest report on physician and APP recruiting incentives. In 2023, average starting pay was $158,000, growing to $164,000 this year.
5. APPs are being offered an average signing bonus of $11,758, with relocation allowances averaging $7,910, according to the report.
Shifting demand
6. For the fourth year straight, nurse practitioners have been the most requested type of healthcare provider in AMN Healthcare's job searches. The demand is driven by a shortage of physicians and increasing use of NPs in urgent care centers, retail clinics and telemedicine. Overall, searches for APPs now surpass those for primary care physicians.
7. Beyond just rural areas, demand for APPs is rising in urban areas as well, search engagement data from AMN suggests. Seventy-one percent of recruiting searches were for positions in cities with populations of 100,000 or more.