Feature Article
Where the Doctors Are
By Steve Osborn
Where are the doctors in Sonoma County, and what is
their mode of practice? Those questions can be at least partially answered
by consulting the current SCMA physician directory, published in December
2004. The directory lists the 774 local physicians, including non-SCMA
members, who verified their address information during the fall of 2004.
It does not, however, include about 250 nonmembers who failed to return
SCMA’s verification letters. Even though the directory is therefore
incomplete, the data contained therein can still be used to produce a
rough sketch—or at least a few bar graphs—of physician practice
modes, group sizes, and locations.
Figure 1 shows how local physicians are distributed across the three main
modes of practice: government, salaried, and private practice. “Government”
means doctors who work at government-funded facilities, such as community
health clinics, the Sonoma Developmental Center, and Public Health. “Salaried”
means non-government doctors who receive a regular monthly salary. Kaiser
is the prime example of this mode; but other local groups, such as PCA,
are considered salaried because they pay their doctors a fixed monthly
amount (a “draw”), plus occasional bonuses. Finally, “private
practice” means doctors whose income fluctuates from month to month,
depending on patient volume. At 65% of the total, private practice is
still the dominant mode in Sonoma County. Salaried physicians account
for 30%, and the remaining 5% are paid by the government.
Figure 2 shows the distribution of physicians across group size: solo,
small, medium, and large. “Solo” means a doctor with a unique
office address, such as a suite in an office building. (Doctors who share
office space are not considered “solo,” even though their
practices may be separate.) “Small” means a group of 2-10
doctors who have the same address or work for the same company. The latter
part of that definition also applies to “medium” (11-100 doctors)
and “large” (more than 100). Local doctors are fairly evenly
distributed across group sizes, with 24% in solo practice, 35% in small
groups (e.g., Pediatric Associates), 16% in medium groups (e.g., NCMA),
and 25% in one large group (Kaiser).
Figure 3 shows where doctors are located in Sonoma County. As one might
expect, more than two-thirds (70%) are crowded into the seething metropolis
of Santa Rosa, with Petaluma a distant second at 7%. Surprisingly, Sebastopol
(also 7%) is in third place, close behind Petaluma and well ahead of Sonoma
(4%), Healdsburg (4%), Rohnert Park (4%), and the widely scattered “Other”
(4%).
Mr. Osborn edits Sonoma Medicine.
Sonoma Medicine, Volume 56, Number 2 (Spring 2005).
