It takes a lot of patience to be a patient.
There are about 1.2 billion physician office visits annually in the United States, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The center, which has collected data on this subject for decades, also reports that patients wait an average of just “north” of 11 minutes to see a doctor or healthcare provider.
You will have to get out your calculators to discover that Americans spend about 25,000 years just waiting in doctor’s offices each year.
But please don’t quote that number to a friend who has just been to a hospital emergency room, because the wait to see a doctor is much longer there.
These are serious lost opportunity costs. If we care about what the nation’s real healthcare tab is, just add another $1.9 billion a year (minimum wage rates in the US in 2013) x (25,000 years).
So why do we have to wait so long in a doctor’s waiting room?
And why do we have to fill out a “Patient Interview Form” every time we see a doctor? It’s another example of lost opportunity costs for physicians and their patients. I have probably filled out the patient interview form no less than 20 to 30 times in my lifetime. You’ve probably had similar experiences. Did you ever wonder what actually happens to the data collected on these forms? Shouldn’t we as patients be asked to contribute our baseline information just once, and then simply update the data as needed?
Couldn’t we also use our valuable waiting room time to contribute some useful contextual environmental information into our brand new electronic medical record, rather than just reading
