{"id":1416,"date":"2017-11-06T18:20:25","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T02:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.sprucehealth.com\/?p=1416"},"modified":"2023-10-26T06:03:21","modified_gmt":"2023-10-26T13:03:21","slug":"doctors-losing-hour-day-phone-call-overhead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sprucehealth.com\/blog\/doctors-losing-hour-day-phone-call-overhead\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctors Are Losing More Than an Hour a Day to Phone Call Overhead"},"content":{"rendered":"

While\u00a0I was working on our recent profile of Wellness for Life<\/a> and their\u00a0innovative\u00a0approach to\u00a0patient\u00a0calls, I began to wonder just how much time the average practice loses to\u00a0the phone. In my calculation,\u00a0it\u00a0might actually be more than an hour a day per clinician<\/strong>. That number\u00a0also excludes non-patient calls and considers only the overhead of\u00a0each phone call, not its productive talk time, so the real losses may be even higher.<\/p>\n

If you just want the bottom-line stat, then that’s it: every provider in a medical practice will generate more than an hour of wasted phone-related time every single day. If you want to see\u00a0the methodology behind that number, however, read on for an avalanche of evidence (and a slightly smaller avalanche of gut-feeling assumptions that I will do my best to flag).<\/p>\n

Medical Practices Get (And Make) a Ton of Phone Calls<\/h2>\n

We’re going to consider primary care outpatient settings for this analysis\u00a0because such offices\u00a0handle about half of all outpatient encounters, and nearly 40% of physicians identify with a primary care specialty, so this seems like a reasonable\u00a0scope to set to maximize applicability.1,2<\/sup><\/p>\n

First, let’s see how many calls primary care offices are making and receiving every day. Good data exist from multiple\u00a0different sources on incoming patient call volume, so let’s start there:<\/p>\n

\n

Incoming Patient Call Volume\u00a0for Seven Practices<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Patients<\/b><\/td>\nCalls\/Day per 1,000 Patients<\/b><\/td>\nSource<\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
8,440<\/td>\n11<\/td>\nNEJM3<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
32,000<\/td>\n19<\/td>\nMedical Economics4<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10,889<\/td>\n19<\/td>\nJABFM5<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
18,243<\/td>\n17<\/td>\nJABFM5<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
9,685<\/td>\n21<\/td>\nJABFM5<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
11,868<\/td>\n33<\/td>\nJABFM5<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
15,217<\/td>\n26<\/td>\nJGIM6<\/sup><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

These numbers are fairly similar, which is reassuring for accuracy, and they average out to\u00a021 incoming patient calls per day\u00a0for every thousand panel patients<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

There didn’t seem to be such solid data for\u00a0outgoing calls, but one\u00a0internally published academic study examined nine primary care sites and found a 10:7 ratio of inbound to outbound calls<\/strong>, so we’ll go with that.7<\/sup><\/p>\n

Next, we need to know how\u00a0large the average primary care patient panel is. An oft-quoted number is 2,500 patients, but this has been shown to be\u00a0erroneously high. Instead, the best data suggest that panels\u00a0most commonly contain 1,200 to 1,900 patients per provider.8<\/sup>\u00a0We’ll use a medium panel size of 1,500 patients per provider<\/strong> for our calculations.<\/p>\n

If we then combine all of the numbers that we have so far, we end up with an estimate for the total call volume per primary care provider per day:<\/p>\n

A typical provider has 53 patient calls per\u00a0day!<\/strong><\/p>\n

This number doesn’t attempt to count non-patient calls, such as those from pharmacies, insurance companies, drug reps, or other medical practices, so it is by nature a conservative estimate. Realistically, some providers will generate even more than 53 calls per day. But it\u00a0seems like a reasonable baseline.<\/p>\n

Phone Calls Have a Lot of Overhead<\/h2>\n

Now that we have an estimate of the number of patient calls per provider per day, the question becomes how much overhead time each of those phone interactions eats up. For this analysis, we’ll count an activity as “overhead” if it relates to a phone\u00a0call but isn’t actual medical conversation between\u00a0a patient and provider.<\/p>\n

We’ll also assume that the medical\u00a0practice in question has front-office staff that\u00a0make and receive 90% of all calls and that 26% of\u00a0incoming calls can be handled entirely by these staff members, with no need for clinician input. The first number is an assumption, but the second is based on call data from an actual primary care practice.3<\/sup><\/p>\n

With that setup in mind, let’s pick some numbers:<\/p>\n