Most medical groups treat medical assistants like “support.” A line item. A local hiring problem. Something the practice manager can patch with a few Indeed posts and a pizza party.

That mindset is costing you real money and, worse, slowly poisoning patient access and clinician morale.

Because the medical assistant role isn’t “support.” It’s the circulatory system of ambulatory care. When it’s thin, everything downstream gets clogged: rooms sit empty, schedules wobble, physicians backfill clerical work, patient messages pile up, and your “patient experience strategy” turns into apology scripting at the front desk.

And here’s the part that stings: it’s not happening because your leaders are lazy. It’s happening because the DIY staffing model for medical assistants is structurally broken in 2026.

The Medical Assistant shortage isn’t a bad season. It’s the weather.

If you’re telling yourself, “We just need one good hiring push,” you’re basically arguing with the labor market.

MGMA has been blunt that medical assistants remain among the toughest roles to hire in medical practices, with longer time-to-hire and leaders often needing to start recruiting two months or more in advance just to fill a vacancy.

And the macro trend is not easing up. Federal labor projections anticipate medical assistant employment growth of 15% from 2023 to 2033, with roughly 119,800 openings per year (growth + replacement).

So if your operating plan is “hire our way out of it,” you’re competing in a market that’s designed to keep openings chronic.

Chronic openings don’t just mean understaffing. They mean instability:

• Constant onboarding and retraining
• Variable rooming speed, room prep, and instrument sterilization
• Inconsistent inbox triage and documentation support
• Delayed phlebotomy, injections, and point-of-care tests
• Everyone walking around with that low-grade “we’re behind” anxiety
  

You can’t standardize care delivery on a foundation that keeps crumbling.

What chronic medical assistant openings do to productivity (it’s not subtle)

Let’s talk about the myth that physicians can “push through” a staffing gap.

AMGA’s data paints a familiar picture: demand and production rise faster than staffing support. In their 2024 staffing survey release, AMGA reported median productivity (wRVUs) up 5.2% and median visits up 3.0%, while staffing increased only 1.3% per provider over the same timeframe.

That’s the math behind why your clinic feels like it’s sprinting in sand.

Even more telling: AMGA noted that when staffing is adjusted for volume, clinic staff per 10,000 wRVUs fell from 4.35 FTEs (2020) to 3.71, a 14.7% decrease. 

Here’s what that looks like on a normal Tuesday:

• Fewer rooms are turned per hour because rooms and equipment aren’t prepped
  
• Delays on vitals, injections, phlebotomy, meds, orders, and documentation support
  
• Providers doing “just one quick thing” 60 times a day
  
• More downstream chaos (callbacks, refill delays, portal messages)
  

You’re not just losing throughput. You’re losing flow. And flow is what makes an ambulatory engine profitable.

Access gets worse—and everyone notices

When medical assistant coverage is unstable, you don’t simply run a slower clinic. You hold capacity back—sometimes intentionally (blocked templates), sometimes accidentally (late starts, longer cycle times).

AMGA reported a sharp deterioration in access metrics: within system-affiliated groups, the next available for established patients rose from 1.1 days (2022) to 4.4 days (2024). 

Patients don’t experience this as “staffing challenges.” They experience it as:

• “They can’t get me in.”
• “Nobody calls me back.”
• “Every visit feels rushed.”
• “I’m just a number.”

And once you train patients to expect friction, they start behaving differently:

• More no-shows
• More escalations
• More “urgent” messages
• More switching

You can spend a fortune on marketing and still bleed patients because the access experience is leaky.

Satisfaction scores don’t live in a vacuum

Patient experience is heavily driven by operational reality: access, coordination, responsiveness, and whether the visit feels calm and competent.

Press Ganey’s 2024 reporting showed medical practices reached a five-year high “Likelihood to Recommend” score of 84.1/100 in 2023—good news, but also a reminder that the bar is competitive and patients’ tolerance for friction is dropping (especially among younger patients).

Translation: if your staffing gaps create longer waits, disorganized visits, and poor follow-up, you’re not just losing points—you’re losing trust.

Now let’s talk about the other satisfaction score that matters: the one that determines whether you can keep physicians.

Your physicians are doing medical assistant work. They hate it. And it shows.

You can call it “everyone pitching in,” but when clinicians routinely backfill medical assistant tasks, it’s not teamwork—it’s skill waste.

There’s strong evidence that incomplete team staffing isn’t just annoying—it correlates with burnout. A 2025 research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine found that physicians working with an incompletely staffed team more than 25% of the time (versus not) had substantially higher burnout prevalence (reported in the abstract’s results).

The AMA’s organizational well-being survey data make the mechanism painfully clear:

• 50.1% of physicians (2023 data referenced in the AMA summary) said a barrier to delegating tasks was: “I do not have enough medical assistants or nurses.”
  
• 26.5% cited lack of adequate doctors and clinically trained support staff as a key stressor.
  

So when you say, “We’re short two medical assistants, we’ll manage,” what your physicians hear is:

“You’ll carry the operational debt with your own time and attention.”

That debt compounds. It becomes:

• More inbox after-hours work
• Less decompression between visits
• More resentment at leadership
• Lower engagement
• Higher turnover risk

And when physician engagement drops, organizations feel it everywhere. Press Ganey’s physician experience insights highlight the tight linkage between alignment and engagement—80% of organizations with low physician alignment also have low physician engagement.

In other words, a top-of-license strategy isn’t just HR. It’s culture. It’s retention. It’s brand.

The hidden cost isn’t wages—it’s variability

Most groups focus on wage pressure (and yes, wages are rising). But the larger financial hit is variability:

• New medical assistant every few months
  
• Different training quality
  
• Different rooming style
  
• Different documentation habits
  
• Different patient communication tone
  

You can’t build a reliable patient experience on a revolving door.

MGMA’s hiring and retention guidance acknowledges that medical assistant hiring challenges have affected “almost all practices,” pushing many to update recruiting and retention approaches. 

That’s code for: your competitors are adapting. If you aren’t, you’re falling behind—even if your physicians are working heroically to mask it.

So what do you do instead of “manage it harder”?

You don’t win this by asking your practice managers to become full-time recruiters. You win by treating medical assistant capacity like a core operating system—planned, standardized, and resilient.

That usually means moving away from the “every clinic fends for itself” model and toward something that looks more like:

• A centralized talent engine (recruiting + pipeline + predictable onboarding)
  
• Standardized training and competencies (so performance is consistent)
  
• Coverage design (float pools, cross-training, surge plans)
  
• Productivity-based staffing targets (staffing tied to volume, not just provider count—because AMGA’s volume-adjusted staffing trends are moving the wrong way)
  
• Clear delegation protocols so physicians aren’t stuck doing non-physician work (which the AMA data calls out as a major barrier and stressor)
  

If you’re serious about growth—more providers, more sites, more visits—you can’t keep running staffing like a local craft project.

Takeaway: The new reality

Managing your own medical assistant staff feels responsible. It feels hands-on. It feels like control.

But for most medical groups, it’s actually self-inflicted operational fragility—and it’s quietly killing your ability to scale access, protect physician energy, and deliver a consistent experience patients want to come back to.

The labor market is telling you the truth: medical assistant openings will stay chronic. 

The productivity math is telling you the truth: volume is outpacing support. 

And physicians are telling you the truth: insufficient support from medical assistants blocks delegation and adds stress. 

If you want a healthier medical group, stop treating medical assistant staffing like a background task. Start treating it like what it is:

Your clinical capacity engine.

Berg, Sara. “Strong Care Teams Are Key to Boosting Physician Well-Being.” American Medical Association, 9 Sept. 2025, www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/strong-care-teams-are-key-boosting-physician-well-being.

Harrop, Chris. “Why Medical Assistants Are Still Tougher to Hire Today than Nurses, Coders and Other Medical Practice Staff.” MGMA, www.mgma.com/mgma-stat/why-medical-assistants-are-still-tougher-to-hire-today-than-nurses-coders-and-other-medical-practice-staff.

“New Amga Staffing Survey Reveals Staffing Increases behind Gains in Productivity.” AMGA, AMGA, 19 Feb. 2025, www.amga.org/about-amga/newsroom/press-releases/2024/october/new-amga-staffing-survey-reveals-staffing-increases-behind-gains-in-productivity.

“Patient Experience in 2024: Bridging The Gap in Patient Care Journeys.” Press Ganey, 29 Jan. 2026, info.pressganey.com/press-ganey-blog-healthcare-experience-insights/patient-experience-in-2024-bridging-the-gap.

“Physician Experience in 2024: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities.” Press Ganey, 28 Jan. 2026, info.pressganey.com/press-ganey-blog-healthcare-experience-insights/physician-experience-2024-trends.

Rotenstein, Lisa, et al. “Incomplete Team Staffing, Burnout, and Work Intentions Among US Physicians.” JAMA Network, jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2833881.

“Successful Healthcare Hiring & Employee Retention in 2024.” Successful Healthcare Hiring & Employee Retention in 2024, www.mgma.com/getkaiasset/d7bb3457-784e-4785-9975-bf8d22bbb0d1/MGMA-Hiring-and-Retention-Report-January-2024.pdf.