{"id":547433,"date":"2010-04-29T15:35:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T19:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:consumerist.com,2010:\/\/1.10005158"},"modified":"2010-04-29T15:18:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T19:18:00","slug":"what-do-doctors-really-do-all-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/547433","title":{"rendered":"What Do Doctors Really Do All Day?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Ever wondered what your primary care physician is doing when they’re not seeing patients. Quite a lot, says a new study that breaks down the daily tasks faced by doctors at a small family practice.<\/p>\n

Dr. Richard Baron and his colleagues at their Philadelphia practice studied the data in their electronic health record and recently published their findings in the New England Journal of Medicine.<\/p>\n

In addition to seeing an average of 18.1 patients\/day, each day the doctors in the study:<\/p>\n

* Received and made an average of 23.7 telephone calls “of sufficient clinical import to engage a physician,” almost 80% of which were handled directly by the doctor.<\/p>\n

* Averaged 16.8 e-mails. 59.3% for interpreting test results, 21.7% for responding to patients, 9.3% for administrative problems, 5.0% for acute problems, 2.8% for proactive outreach to patients, 1.9% for discussions with consultants.<\/p>\n

* Processed 12.1 prescription refills, not including those as part of a patient visit.<\/p>\n

* Reviewed 19.5 lab reports<\/p>\n

* Reviewed 11.1 imaging reports<\/p>\n

* Reviewed 13.9 consult reports<\/p>\n

And of course the reviewing of the above reports all involves updating of patient records, as well as communicating with both the patients and those who provided the reports.<\/p>\n

The study said that the physicians in this office averaged a 50-60 hour work week and that there were 3.5 members of support staff for every one physician.<\/p>\n

What’s Keeping Us So Busy in Primary Care? A Snapshot from One Practice<\/a> [NEJM via WSJ<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever wondered what your primary care physician is doing when they’re not seeing patients. Quite a lot, says a new study that breaks down the daily tasks faced by doctors at a small family practice. Dr. Richard Baron and his colleagues at their Philadelphia practice studied the data in their electronic health record and recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5519,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5519"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}