The summary statistics presented here are based on 2022 data from the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners. Much of the data are self-reported and so may not be entirely accurate. For the most part, we give statistics for Alabama physicians (that is, physicians with an active Alabama medical license who practice in the state), and we break down the data according to two basic dichotomies; primary care physicians versus specialists, and rural versus urban physicians. Of course, these two dichotomies have significant overlap, since many rural physicians are primary care physicians. The one exception is the tab on where we give the distiribution of physicians with active Alabama licenses by practice state.
Primary care refers to Alabama physicians that are actually practicing primary care, which we define as
We exclude from the primary care list those physicians whose specialty is in a primary care area, but whose practice is not, such as physicians practicing emergency medicine, sports medicine, emergent care or working as hospitalists. On this site, physicians who are not classified as primary care are referred to generically as specialists. By our count, after considerable cleaning and filtering, there are 12,869 licensed physicians practicing in Alabama. Of these, 2811 (21.8%) practice primary care while 10,117 (78.2%) are specialists.
The classification of a physician as rural or urban is based on the physician's practice community, as classified by the US Cenus Bureau. Alabama has 12 urbanized areas (and the Pensacola, FL urbanized area has a small overlap with Alabama). A physician who practices in a community that falls into an urbanized area is classified as urban; otherwise he/she is classified as rural.
Our data are displayed in the form of interactive maps and interactive tables. The maps generally have point or area layers that can be added or removed with the layer control on the map. The user can zoom in and out of a map and move about in the usual way. Zooming in reveals additional features such as small towns and then streets and roads. A click on the home button returns the map to its origional location and scale. The zoom-to-area button allows the user to zoom to a selected rectangular area of the map. Clicking on an object in a layer shows summary data for that object.
The interactive tables can be sorted by any field, by clicking on the header for that field. The buttons at the top allow the table data to be copied to the clipboard, in tab-separated text format, printed, or downloaded in various formats (tab-separated text, Excel, or PDF). With the search bar, the table can be filtered according to a text string.
In the interactive tables you can click on a row to select an object (community, county, PCSA) and see the object highlighted in the map. You can select as many rows as you wish. Click on a selected row again to de-select and remove the highlighting in the map.
The Office for Family Health Education and Research provides an infrastructure where opportunities for research in education, policy, clinical medicine and other scholarly works in primary care can flourish. The office produces and disseminates practical clinical information to primary care physicians, coordinates and conducts studies that deal with the health care education of primary care physicians and patients, as well as the broader issues of state health policy, health access and health manpower.