Wait Times to See Physicians Continue to Climb

Medscape

5 hours ago

Your patient has waited 4 weeks for a 15-minute visit, and you're double-booked and distracted. As physician shortages collide with rising demand, wait times have increased, and appointment delays are the norm, not the exception. Patients are frustrated, and physicians are overwhelmed.
In fact, according to a new survey conducted by AMN Healthcare, the average physician appointment wait time in 15 major metropolitan areas has increased by 19% since the survey was last conducted in 2022 and by 48% since it was first conducted in 2004. This translates to patients waiting 31 days on average to book time with a healthcare provider, up from 26 days in 2022 and 21 days in 2004.
Medscape continually surveys physicians and other medical professionals about key practice challenges and current issues, creating high-impact analyses. For example, Medscape's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Adoption in Healthcare Report 2024 found that Just 18% of physician offices use AI to create staff schedules, yet 30% predict they'll use AI for this in the future.
19% of physician offices use AI for patient census predictions, yet 40% predict they'll use AI for this in the future.
One big surprise about the survey is that appointment wait times weren't even longer, Jeff Decker, president of AMN's physician and leadership solutions division, told Medscape Medical News , adding that in Boston, wait times were the longest (65 days), while Atlanta had the shortest wait times (12 days).
'Anecdotally, we've heard of physician appointment wait times that commonly extend 2 or 3 months or more rather than a few weeks or 1 month,' Decker said. 'We think this may be a result of medical practice consolidation, where more physicians are part of large medical groups than has been the case in the past.'
In addition, wait times can vary based on whether (or not) the physician accepts Medicare or Medicaid and tend to be even longer when new patients book an appointment with a specialist. The survey found there was a 42-day wait for obstetricians and gynecologists (ob/gyns), a 40-day wait for gastroenterologists, and a 36.5-day wait for dermatologists, something Dara Spearman, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in private practice in Fort Wayne, Indiana, said sounds accurate.
'There are fewer than 10 dermatologists in Fort Wayne, so this creates quite a backlog,' she said. 'Because dermatologists can treat over 3000 diseases, I'm trying to triage a bit and see if we can overlap with other specialties, like having pediatricians or primary care start treatments for a patient with acne, to leave room for patients who need to see us immediately.'
Appointment times for serious cases, such as the skin cancers she sees among her farmer patient population, are Spearman's greatest priority.
'When you're talking about melanoma, time is of the essence,' she said. 'Patients have to get in quickly to get it recognized, and the earlier you get it out, the less likely it is to spread. That's why I use the Secure Chat feature on Epic. This way, when primary care reaches out about something they're worried about, I can get that patient in as fast as possible.'
Like Spearman, physicians around the country are coming up with other unique solutions to make sure they can get patients into the office as quickly as their schedules will allow.
For one, partnering with other professionals can open up patient appointment slots, and many medical practices today, both in primary care and in specialty areas, are using advanced practice professionals to do just that.
'Medical practices are using locum tenens physicians to extend services and patient access, particularly during peak usage periods,' AMN's Decker said. 'Working alongside nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) will also ease their workload and free up their time.'
Partnering with NPs was exactly what Ashish Nanda, MD, director of Stroke and Neuro-Interventional at Providence Health System in Orange County, California, proposed to his hospital as he sketched out the creation of a stroke clinic there, which will open in August 2025.
'I realized that our stroke patients were getting discharged but needed follow-up to prevent another one from occurring,' Nanda said. 'The only way to do that was to see them in clinic, so I proposed a dedicated stroke clinic staffed by one specialist and one NP. With two clinicians, we can see more volume and make sure appointments are easier to book.'
Another way to boost efficiency is to 'divide and conquer' health conditions within your own practice.
'For example, one partner in the practice can do skin cancer evaluations while the other can focus on complex dermatology procedures,' Spearman said. 'That can be boring for some physicians, but this can really help with scheduling.'
This is something Spearman has observed among her ob/gyn colleagues.
'As ob/gyns get older, many are done with the OB life of being on-call,' she said. 'They can opt to focus instead on pelvic disorders or endometriosis. By rethinking how your practice is run, you can streamline the process for patients, too.'
Ultimately, the physicians Medscape Medical News spoke with agree that technology will be the ultimate solution to the extensive physician wait times patients are currently experiencing.
'Right now, physicians are spending 50% of their day on administration, whether it's writing notes, following up on labs, and documenting visits, which means they can't see the many patients that need to be seen in a day,' Nanda said.
In turn, if AI can cut that administrative time down to 10%, it means a physician can double the number of patients they see, which will ease the current bottleneck, added Samuel R. Browd, MD, PhD, professor of neurological surgery at the University of Washington and attending neurosurgeon at Seattle Children's Hospital in Seattle.
'Our hope is that the emergence of new technology that's clumped under AI is going to create the ability to have more efficiency within the system and allow the current number of providers to be able to scale what they're able to do,' Browd said. 'I'm doing clinic today and probably spend half of the time, if not more, managing Epic, doing paperwork, and documenting visits instead of engaging with patients.'
The goal is for AI-powered documentation tools to become more and more of a norm in the hopes that this will help lessen administrative tasks.
'The more burdened we are, the less quality care we can deliver,' Browd said. 'The hope is that with AI and other emerging tools, we can create a better work environment, too.'
Happily, Browd says technology is moving rapidly, which may mean that within the next 3-5 years, it will become increasingly easier to make a doctor's appointment — quickly and efficiently.
'If you fast forward to 5 years down the road, what we do day-to-day will be significantly different and will be beneficial in terms of enabling patients to have better access to care,' he said.
This will improve the caregiving experience for physicians, too.
'My hope is that this will also change the work environment for doctors in a positive way,' Browd said. 'This will allow us to get back to being doctors, back to the things that brought us into the field in the first place — like taking our time to care for and listen to patients.'