The most common error during a patient visit is to waste time on unnecessary tasks. Since patients may have hidden reasons for their visits, you and your nurse must be able to uncover this information quickly. Family physicians increasingly feel the pressure to squeeze more and more activity into shorter and shorter patient visits. You want to be readily available to your patients and attentive to their needs. Based on my own practice and teaching experience, I find the key is to focus more on the patient encounter and less on the clock.
Efficiency is more than finishing on time.
It is best viewed as the ratio of quality to time. The most efficient provider maximizes the quality of the patient encounter while minimizing the time spent in the actual visit. One common error during an office visit is to carry out useless tasks. A greater error is to omit evidence-based tasks that really make a difference. If you would like to improve your efficiency in patient visits, consider the following suggestions.