News: PCP workload correlates with patient complexity, analysis suggests

The typical primary care physician (PCP) requires, at minimum, a 60 hour a week to complete their patient panel, according to MedPage Today.

The cited study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, examined the work weeks of 406 PCPs from the Mass General Brigham Health System. According to the analysis, there was a positive correlation between a patient’s Elixhauser score and the provider’s “yearly time expenditure per patient.”

In other words, patients who reportedly possessed a higher level of clinical complexity presented a greater time burden on PCPs.

"Although we have a general sense that the work of primary care physicians exceeds a standard workweek, it was valuable to quantify that taking care of a patient panel takes the median, full-time PCP 62 hours a week," Lisa Rotenstein, MD, MBA, MSc, of the University of California San Francisco, told MedPage Today.

"For some PCPs, it takes up to 89 hours a week. These findings underscore the need to rebalance and support the work of primary care physicians in order to ensure that the job is sustainable,” she concluded.

Sixty-eight percent of the patient panel was female, 7.3% were on Medicaid, 7.6% had mental health problems, and 2.1% required an interpreter.

Editor’s note: To read the MedPage Today coverage, click here. To read the Annals of Internal Medicine study, click here.