Medical Specialty

Key facts

Training accredited by

Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)

Certifying bodies

24 ABMS member boards and the AOA specialty certifying boards

Specialty in provider data

NUCC taxonomy codes (NPPES) and Medicare specialty codes (PECOS)

What is a medical specialty?

After medical school, a physician enters a residency in one specialty, such as internal medicine, general surgery, psychiatry or radiology. Completing residency qualifies the physician to seek board certification in that field. Many then complete a fellowship in a subspecialty, such as cardiovascular disease within internal medicine or pediatric hematology-oncology within pediatrics.

Specialty describes training and credentials, while day-to-day practice can be narrower or broader. A board-certified internist may work only as a hospitalist, and a family physician may focus on sports medicine.

How specialties are organized

Specialties are often grouped this way:

• Primary care: family medicine, general internal medicine and general pediatrics, with obstetrics and gynecology included in some definitions.
• Medical specialties and subspecialties: such as cardiology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, oncology and rheumatology.
• Surgical specialties: such as general surgery, orthopedic surgery, neurological surgery, urology and ophthalmology.
• Hospital-based specialties: such as anesthesiology, emergency medicine, radiology and pathology.

Why specialty matters

Specialty is the first filter in most provider analyses. Drug and device companies size markets and plan field coverage around the specialties that treat a condition. Payers check networks for adequate specialist coverage, recruiters match openings to specialties, and trial sponsors choose investigators by specialty and subspecialty. Specialty also shapes fair comparisons, because utilization, prescribing and quality benchmarks are usually calculated within a specialty.

How specialty appears in data

Public data records specialty in more than one way. NPPES stores self-selected taxonomy codes from the NUCC code set, Medicare assigns its own specialty codes through enrollment in PECOS, and board certification status comes from the certifying boards. These sources can disagree for the same NPI, so an analysis should state which specialty field it uses.

Sources also differ in granularity. One source may capture a subspecialty while another groups the same physician under the broader parent specialty.