The numbers are pointing to a shortage of gastroenterologists.
However given the source of the data, I’d be a little dubious. Olympus Corporation of the Americas, a company that manufactures endoscopes, commissioned the study. It certainly would be in their best interest to have more gastroenterologists trained, and use their scopes.
That being said, a recent NEJM study, which showed that colonoscopies aren’t as accurate as initially thought, may indeed legitimately drive up the number of screening colonoscopies. If that data is validated, then yes, more gastroenterologists would certainly be needed.
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{ 3 comments }
We don’t need fellowship trained gastroenterologists to do colonoscopies. Surgeons and a few family physicians also do these and, with proper training, even midlevels could do these.
Ditto Anon 7:22. Kaiser already proved that supervised nurses can do routine low-risk colonoscopies just as well as fellowship-trained gastroenterologists.
And guess what? “Fellowship-trained” sure sounds impressive, but the hands-on time in the endoscopy suite is 1-1.5 years. That’s it. Pretty easy to provide the same to non-MDs.
If gastroenterologists are relying on the dearth-of-colonoscopist argument to protect their inflated reimbursements, they will lose.
Screening colonoscopies should be performed by trained midlevels. Shortage goes away, GI docs are back evaluating patients, taking call and following up on abnormalities, as they should be. This procedure focused, boondoggle should come to an end.
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