Healthcare Workforce

Health systems and ACOs are facing intensifying workforce constraints across specialty, primary, behavioral health, and pharmacy teams, with renewed attention on the looming cardiologist retirement wave and broader physician shortages that could weaken access, attribution stability, and chronic disease performance in Medicare risk and shared-savings models. The near-term VBC implication is that organizations must treat workforce redesign—not just staffing levels—as a care delivery strategy, using team-based models, flexible deployment, behavioral health integration, and technology enablement to preserve access and quality benchmarks under downside-risk contracts. See Becker’s coverage of the cardiologist retirement wave and Modern Healthcare’s argument that the workforce problem is fundamentally about [care model design](https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiqgFBVV95cUxPN0p