Revisiting the Time Needed to Provide Adult Primary Care - Journal of General Internal Medicine

Most doctor’s offices are open an average of thirty to forty hours a week, and host practices of approximately 2,500 patients.22 On the basis of recommendations from national clinical care guidelines for preventive services and chronic disease management, sufficiently addressing the needs of this size practice would require 21.7 working hours per d

nearly half of a primary care physician’s time is spent on documentation and follow-up, outside the examination room without the patient present.

as much as 25 percent of a provider’s time is not spent with a patient.

Even for primary care physicians, who are meant to be the main portal for patients seeking health care, making a full investment in collecting a patient’s history and assessing current lifestyle can be difficult.

Fighting a rising tide of paperwork and bureaucracy, providers of health care, whether physicians, nurses, or administrators, say that time has become a scarce resource of which they have far too little.

more than 25 percent of a patient’s encounter with us is spent on paperwork as opposed to direct patient care.