A physician or organization looking to build a new ASC has to think about several factors when settling on a location. Prominent among them are the area's average physician pay, friendliness to new businesses and the amount of competition.
Becker's ASC Review has compiled data from the 2020 Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, state regulations on new ASCs and new business applications per capita.
| Rank |
State |
Physicians Per 100k Population |
Avg Physician Pay |
New business applications per 1k residents |
Becker's Composite |
| 1 |
Wyoming |
21.5 |
$263,540 |
58.1 |
8.4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 |
Montana |
21.6 |
$271,560 |
17.5 |
3.7 |
| 3 |
Idaho |
21.5 |
$246,220 |
15.5 |
3.4 |
| 4 |
Georgia |
17.4 |
$251,300 |
30.5 |
3.4 |
| 5 |
South Dakota |
25.6 |
$269,100 |
11.3 |
3 |
| 6 |
Utah |
22 |
$239,450 |
19.2 |
3 |
| 7 |
Nevada |
26.1 |
$251,840 |
21.8 |
2.9 |
| 8 |
Colorado |
36.2 |
$247,520 |
19.2 |
2.7 |
| 9 |
Delaware |
29.3 |
$219,940 |
45 |
2.7 |
| 10 |
Florida |
24.7 |
$220,450 |
29.4 |
2.3 |
Methodology
To convert each dataset into comparable numbers, Becker's calculated the standard deviation and average of each, which were both used to determine the Z-scores for every value. The Z-score is a measure of how far a point of data is from its parent dataset's average.
For "average physician pay" and "new business applications per capita," higher numbers are clearly better, but for "physicians per 100K population," golf rules apply: the lowest score wins. In calculating the Becker's composite, the signs were reversed on the Z-score categories playing by golf rules, which were then summed with the other two Z-scores and a value reflecting the restrictiveness of state regulations.