A common concern for any future healthcare practitioner, OMFS included, is how saturated an area of the country is and how that will affect your future practice. Several places usually come to mind as to having a higher than normal amount of providers. If you guessed California, New York, and Texas, you would be right. But before ending there, I thought it would be interesting to analyze where the concentrations of oral and maxillofacial surgeons were state by state. I took the data a little further by calculating the ratios of OMFS per 100k citizens and per 100 dentists in each state.
Interesting results include how California (1.67) has a lower surgeon to population ratio than Maine (2.33). Connecticut (3.51) has the highest ratio while Wyoming (0.85) has the lowest. From the 2010 census data I gathered, there are only 5 total oral surgeons in Wyoming (In 2017, there are now ~10 I could find registered)! The total number of practicing surgeons in each state doesn’t provide you with much insight, so it’s important to look how they compare against population size and other factors. Although the surgeon to population ratios I provided allows you to see overall trends, states with large populations and geographical areas (California, Texas, and Florida) do not give an adequate picture because of concentrated metropolitan areas. In other words, if you think California is a good place to practice based on its ratio, you’ll be upset if trying to go practice in Los Angeles. A better picture would be if you could create a heat map based off of zip codes or counties. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to do that, but if someone else did I’m sure many would be interested.
Another layer I added was the ratio of surgeons to dentists. This number is interesting because OMFS is referral driven, and the number of dentists can serve as a proxy of dental care coverage. Therefore, if you have a low surgeon to dentist ratio and a high number of dentists per population, it would be advantageous (theoretically) for two reasons. The first, is that with a large number of dentists, you could make the assumption that there is a demand for care there by patients so a larger number of providers are located there. Second, the more patients seeing dentists, then possibly the more referrals you will have in the long run. You could make the argument that more dentists leads to more people keeping things in house and therefore not making it to the oral surgeon. However, I tend to believe a rising tide lifts all boats. I have included a few maps to help visualize the data. I plan on doing some more maps and illustrations in the future that include more depth. If anyone has any additional insights or requests, make sure to comment below and I’ll see what I can do.
*Data based on 2010 Census