Henry Phan is a High Desert native and Program Manager at Providence St. Mary Medical Center, where he oversees crucial healthcare initiatives including residency program development and community outreach. His passion for improving healthcare access in the High Desert drives him to connect underserved populations with valuable medical resources, while creating opportunities for the next generation of local healthcare providers.

By 2034, the U.S. could be short up to 124,000 doctors, a crisis that threatens to unravel our healthcare system and leave entire counties in medical deserts. While medical schools race to graduate more physicians and healthcare systems offer increasingly attractive incentives to recruit doctors, these efforts seem to hit an invisible wall. The truth behind this persistent shortage, and why simply producing more medical school graduates isn’t solving the problem, lies in a decades-old decision that few Americans even know exists.