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The nurse practitioner (NP) workforce has been a focus of considerable policy interest recently, particularly as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act may place additional demands on the healthcare professional workforce. The NP workforce has been growing rapidly in recent years, but fluctuation in enrollments in the past decades has resulted in a wide range of forecasts.To forecast the future NP workforce using a novel method that has been applied to the registered nurse and physician workforces and is robust to fluctuating enrollment trends.An age-cohort regression-based model was applied to the current and historical workforce, which was then forecasted to future years assuming stable age effects and a continuation of recent cohort trends.A total of 6798 NPs who were identified as having completed NP training in the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses between 1992 and 2008.The future workforce is projected to grow to 244,000 in 2025, an increase of 94% from 128,000 in 2008. If NPs are defined more restrictively as those who self-identify their position title as "NP," supply is projected to grow from 86,000 to 198,000 (130%) over this period.The large projected increase in NP supply is higher and more grounded than other forecasts and has several implications: NPs will likely fulfill a substantial amount of future demand for care. Furthermore, as the ratio of NPs to Nurse Practitioners to physicians will surely grow, there could be implications for quality of care and for the configuration of future care delivery systems.

Effective primary care is vital to sustainable provision of primary care for the US population. However, efficiency and effectiveness go hand-in-hand. Effective care is that which enables a health system to optimize the performance of all care providers while eliminating wasteful practices. If high-quality patient care and strengthened patient-provider relationships are to occur outside of isolated pockets of innovation and spread to the populace as a whole, each primary care physician must work within a system that affords the tools, opportunity, and support needed to optimally manage a growing number of patients with mounting health care needs. The expectation that primary care physicians must come into direct contact with each and every patient, no matter the acuity or chief complaint, no longer meets the expectations of patients or those whom we would attract to enter the field of primary care. We can no longer repair the faults in our primary care workforce by simply increasing the number of providers working in exactly the same way primary care physicians have always worked. A modern workforce will require efficient practices to produce the most effective health care for the population.

Predicted primary care shortages have spurred action to increase the number of primary care physicians. However, simply increasing the number of primary care providers is not the only solution to resolving the imbalance between the supply of primary care physicians and the demand for primary care services. In this point-counterpoint, we highlight the limitations of existing primary care shortage predictions and discuss strategies to deliver primary care services without necessarily increasing the number of primary care physicians for a given population. Innovative solutions can be used to reduce or even eliminate projected primary care shortages while changing the prevailing paradigm of primary care.