![]() ![]() The range varies based on being a new or established patient. ![]() Most patients probably don’t bring a timer with them when they visit their primary care doctors. complexity of and number of problems, and the amount of time you spend with your doctor. But if they did, they might have been unpleasantly surprised by the amount of time – or lack thereof – that the doctors spend with them. Unfortunately, primary care has been steadily moving towards an “assembly-line” like system, where physicians are focused on seeing as many patients throughout the day as possible. In fact, a report by Medscape, showed that around half of all physicians spend less than 16 minutes with each patient. The typical office visit for a primary care patient was pegged at 1.3 RVUs, and the American Medical Association coding guidelines for that type of visit suggested a 15-minute consult. Deteriorating Doctor-Patient Relationships This is leading to some very serious problems on both sides of the doctor patient relationship. Patients don’t feel like they have enough time to understand what is going on with their health, and they don’t really feel like their primary care doctor is their first and best resource in regards to their health. If you feel like you aren’t spending enough time with patients, you’re not alone. Meanwhile, seeing 30 patients a day in fifteen minute increments is not the reason that most physicians decided to go into medicine. They don’t have the time to be proactive, helping their patients stay healthy. The goal of this study was to accurately and precisely measure the amount of time that physicians, nurses, and critical support personnel spend with patients (. The Reasons Primary Care Doctors See So Many Patients Instead, they are forced be reactive, focused on treating symptoms and illnesses as they come up. There are a huge number of factors that have caused this current system of primary care, but there are two in particular that are especially important. The first is the model in which traditional primary care doctors get paid. The reimbursement a medical office makes from an office visit can vary depending on the insurance carrier, but it is usually between $70 – $150. For example, a Medicare Annual Wellness Visit leads to an average reimbursement of $111. In fact, computers handily beat out patients: medical interns spent 40 percent of their day with a computer compared with 12 percent of their day with actual living, breathing patients. That means that a private physician’s is largely dependent on the amount of patients he can see every day. When you consider the cost of running a medical practice (rent, staff salaries, equipment, etc.) along with the high cost of medical school, it’s no wonder that primary care physicians don’t see any other choice than to fit in as many patients as they can every day. Research showed that the average consultation length of doctorpatient communication appears to be positively related to the patient satisfaction. ![]()
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