88% of the jobs that keep doctors' schedules aren't scheduling jobs.

The list is AHRQ's Compendium of U.S. Health Systems for 2023, the federal list of US systems with at least one hospital and a group of physicians under common ownership: 639 systems. 28 have since merged into another system on the list, which leaves 611.

For each system we found the job boards where it posts its own openings, with its separate physician-recruitment board where it has one and, for academic systems, the university board where medical-school departments hire. We read every posting on those boards through the same public feeds and sitemaps the boards' own pages use, one request at a time per site, on September 26 to 27, 2026. We kept to each site's robots.txt, including rules that name Anthropic's crawlers, and left alone any site behind a bot check.

That gave 416 systems and 220,414 postings. The other 195 are left out, most often because the job site shows a bot check, its robots.txt refuses crawlers, or the job system has no public feed. The table gives the reason for each, and every share on this page is of the 416.

A job counts when its own duties include building, keeping or changing the work schedule of physicians, residents or advanced practice providers. That covers shifts, call, clinic sessions and operating-room block time, and the clinicians' time off, swaps and coverage. Booking patients into a provider's calendar doesn't count, and neither does keeping nurses' rosters or the job holder's own shifts. Passing on a schedule someone else keeps doesn't count either. Jobs whose schedule covers only residents or fellows (70) are counted apart.

A fixed pattern flagged postings that mention keeping a clinician's schedule, and an AI model labelled each one. Other models then read every likely posting and copied the sentence that shows the duty. A script checked every sentence word for word against the posting, and we read every counted job's sentence ourselves. The models also read a sample of 178 postings the first had turned down. One of them should have counted, so the counts here are a little low.

For every counted job, the first model also answered three more things: what the posting says the schedule involves, whose schedule it is, and how much of the job it is. For what the schedule involves, it pointed to the line of the posting that shows each answer. Where it was unsure, another model read the posting and decided, copying the sentence word for word. We read every line behind a yes and overruled 18 of them. Most postings don't say whether the schedule is shifts or clinic sessions, so those two are left out, and so are credentials and privileges, which one posting ties to the schedule.

The 5,700 filled jobs are an estimate. Health care's job-openings rate, open jobs as a share of filled jobs plus open ones, was 5.7% in July 2026 (BLS). That makes about 16.5 filled jobs for each open one, if these jobs turn over like health care jobs in general.

The unit is the job posting. A posting can hire more than one person, and a department can have someone keeping the schedule with no posting open this week. A posting that appears on two boards of the same system counts once.

Fulkerson Advisors (2026). Who Keeps Doctors' Schedules: Open Jobs at 416 US Health Systems. Read September 26 to 27, 2026. https://www.fulkersonadvisors.com/research/physician-scheduling

Use any of these numbers or quotes. Credit Fulkerson Advisors and link to this page. The data is under a CC BY 4.0 license.