Emergency Care Clinician Classification System

The Emergency Medicine Workforce Committee is working on a classification system that allows for emergency medicine clinicians to identify into one of a limited number of groups. These groups will be specific to the job, not the training or the credentials of the provider. This classification system can then be used for research, to demonstrate the heterogeneity of the workforce and to help direct workforce policy decisions. There appears to be a significant amount of misunderstanding regarding the diversity of emergency medicine jobs and how these are divided within the emergency medicine workforce. It is very important however, that we have a diverse group of leaders to help design the system.

An ED Provider Classification System development project was started. An initial classification system was presented at the 2017 Section meeting with representatives from a broad coalition of EM leadership. The current categories include:

• Academic
• Urgent Care
• Multi-site/Locums
• Military
• Community
• Rural
• Non-clinical
• Freestanding
• Telemedicine

This system can be used for physicians and Advanced Practice Providers. A nine-person committee has been designated for this project. The group will meet early in 2018 to work on details and definitions. The system will be designed into a survey format and sent to the EM Workforce Section members as a trial. It is hoped that once finalized that it can be used as a tool for collecting data regarding the EM workforce.

Guy Nuki, MD
Immediate Past Chai