Primary Care Physicians Need 26.7 Hours Per Day to Do Their Jobs

Primary care physicians (PCPs) don’t have enough time in the day to do their jobs—literally.

In order to explain why many patients do not receive guideline-recommended preventive, chronic disease, and acute care, a team of researchers looked at hypothetical panels of 2,500 patients, representative of the adult US population based on the 2017–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

The simulation study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, reported that PCPs would need 26.7 hours each day to provide preventive, chronic disease, and acute care for a typical panel of U.S. adult patients.

That 26.7 hours would consist of:

• 14.1 hours for preventive care
• 7.2 hours for chronic disease care
• 2.2 hours for acute care
• 3.2 hours for documentation and inbox management

The team of researchers sought to quantify the time needed to provide preventive care, chronic disease care, and acute care for a nationally representative adult patient panel by a PCP alone, and by a PCP as part of a team-based care model. They measured the mean time required for a PCP to provide guideline-recommended preventive, chronic disease, and acute care to the hypothetical patient panel, as well as estimates for visit documentation time and electronic inbox management time. Times were re-estimated in the setting of team-based care. 

In a team-based model, PCPs would require 9.3 hours per day:

• 2 hours for preventive care
• 3.6 hours for chronic disease care
• 1.1 hours for acute care
• 2.6 hours for documentation and inbox management

The researchers concluded that PCPs do not have enough time to provide the guideline-recommended primary care, and although the requirements would decrease by over half with a team-based model, it would still be excessive.