Cardiologists

Employers 

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that, as of May 2018, there were 756,800 physicians and surgeons employed in the United States. According to the State Health Facts Web site of the Kaiser Family Foundation, there were 32,640 actively practicing cardiologists in the United States as of March 2019. Cardiologists are employed in a wide variety of healthcare settings, including hospitals, office-based multispecialty group practices, office-based single-specialty group practices, healthcare organizations, outpatient clinics, and academic (nonhospital) research, military, and government institutions. Some are self-employed in their own practice or group practice. In the past, many physicians, including cardiologists, went into business for themselves, either by starting their own practice or by becoming a partner in an existing one. However, the costs of starting a medical practice or buying into an existing medical practice are too high. Beginning in 2005, more than 50 percent of all physicians worked as salaried employees for hospitals rather than in solo or group practices, and research surveys of the sectoral employment of cardiologists illustrate that this particular employment trend continued during the 2010s.