u/snootiedoo

I am 4 years out of residency, working at my second large hospital system as 1.0 FTE. At our office we have 32 clinical hours and 8 admin hours per week, which I feel is better than many places these days, but still am working 55ish hours per week when you include pajama time.

I use all the Epic efficiency tips, AI scribe and feel I’m generally a pretty efficient person. Am starting to feel going “part time” is the only way to achieve a 40 hour work week.

Curious to hear others experiences with going part time?

Where I am currently working (large hospital system), they do not use the number of patients as having you listed as their PCP in Epic as determining our panel sizes. Instead, they assign a patient to a PCP's panel based on which doc/APP they have seen most frequently in the past 3 years. They also adjust how many "patients" they count as on our panel size based on age and sex. For example, a 20 year old male is worth 0.47 patients, 20 year old female counts as 0.70 patients, 70 year old male counts as 1.55 patients, 70 year old female counts as 1.60 patients.

Currently based on my employers calculations, I have ~500 patients, but my number of patients listed on Epic is 957. I have been working at my current job for one year.

Does anyone else's office do this? Felt somewhat convoluted. Makes me kind of nervous that by the time I get up to 2,000 patients there will actually be 4,000 patients messaging me in Epic?

Curious on everyone's approach to this.

I am an outpatient primary care doc. In the world of 15 and 30 minute appointments, where the office policy allows 15 minute late-patient grace periods, and patients that do not have realistic expectations of what can be covered in that time...I often find myself running 20-30 minutes late, on occasion 45 minutes. I hate this, if I designed the system we would get much more time, but alas I am not the boss and due to my school loans I can't go DPC at this point.

It feels demoralizing patient after patient to apologize for running late, especially when I show up early to work everyday. But on the flipside, when I don't apologize I get nasty reviews, even if I use the "thank you for your patience" line without further explanation.

How do you all handle this?

Curious how you all handle these situations. Occurs daily, see different docs in my office do different things.

Here's an example: It's 11:03 AM and the 11:00 AM patient is not here yet for their 30 minute wellness visit. However, the 11:30 AM patient is here, also a wellness visit. Office has 15 minute grace period. Do you:

A. Have medical assistant room the 11:30 and see them first, recognizing the high likelihood that the 11AM is going to arrive any minute but then will need to wait 30+ minutes to be seen, then likely complain that their visit did not start on time and leave a bad review

B. Wait until 15 minute grace period is up and if they don't show by then start with next patient, though recognizing you will now likely be at least 15 minutes behind the rest of the day

C. Something in the middle?