Survey: It's good to be a doctor in SC

A new report examining factors that affect the professional lives of doctors has ranked South Carolina as the best place to be a medical practitioner in 2015.

WalletHub, a personal finance resources site, compared states on nine factors affecting opportunity and competition and three factors affecting work environment to create an index.

South Carolina's total score placed it first among states, with an opportunity and competition rank of 8 and a work environment rank of 3. Below is an interactive map showing all the states' total scores. Below that is a table showing score breakdowns by category.

South Carolina's best ranking among individual factors was in the level of punitive activity by its state medical board. It has the least punitive state board in the nation. Wyoming has the most punitive board, with about five times as much punitive activity as South Carolina's.

Here are the factors used to create the scores:

Opportunity & Competition – Total Weight: 10

▪  Physicians’ Mean Annual Wage, Adjusted for Cost of Living: Full Weight

▪  Monthly Average Starting Salary, Adjusted for Cost of Living: Full Weight

▪  Physicians’ Wage Disparity: Full Weight (Note: It refers to the wage disparity between 10% percentile and mean annual wage.)

▪  Number of Hospitals per Capita: Full Weight

▪  Insured Population Rate: Full Weight

▪  Medically Underserved Areas or Populations: Full Weight

▪  Projected Percentage of the Population over 65 by 2030: Half Weight

▪  Number of Physicians per Capita: Half Weight

▪  Projected Percentage of Physicians per Capita in 2022: Full Weight

Work Environment – Total Weight: 5

▪  The Rate of State Medical Boards’ Serious Disciplinary Actions per 1,000 Physicians: Full Weight

▪  Malpractice Award Payouts per Capita (Total Payout for Malpractice per Capita by state): Full Weight

▪  Malpractice Liability Insurance Rate: Full Weight

Sources: Data used to create these rankings were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Missouri Economic Research & Information Center, Citizen.org, and Diederich Healthcare.

This story was originally published March 31, 2015 at 8:17 AM.