Too Busy For The Doctor? Here’s How You Can Make Sure You’re Taken Care Of

There’s never a convenient time to be sick, and if your schedule is already jam-packed, it can be difficult to find a good time to see a doctor in the first place. It’s no secret that, generally speaking, patients have plenty of gripes with the traditional healthcare system. Between week-long appointment waiting lists, long in-office wait times, and increasingly short face-time with doctors, going to the doctor can unfortunately feel like a lot of wasted time for lots of people. What can you do to make sure that you’re getting quality care when you need it without losing hours’ worth of time waiting around? Today, we’re examining some of the qualities you should look for in exceptional healthcare that makes the most of your time and gets to the root cause of symptoms. Let’s get started.

Are You Too Busy, or is Your Doctor Too Busy?

First and foremost, it’s important to determine whether you’re too busy to fit in a doctor’s visit, or whether your experiences with physicians in the recent past have been less than efficient. It wouldn’t be surprising if the latter is true: more than half of patients have to wait two weeks or longer to get an appointment with their primary care physician. Despite wait times for appointments increasing, studies show that most doctors and patients spend less than 25 minutes together face-to-face during appointments. When you have very few spare minutes in your day to begin with, it can be difficult to spend hours, days, or weeks waiting for an appointment, only to get minimal facetime with your physician when it finally does happen.

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Making Your Experience More Efficient

Of course, even the most efficient in-person physician visits mean having to carve some time out of your day. The key to saving time in appointments may not be to dramatically decrease the time you’re spending in-office; it may be to improve the quality of the time you’re spending there. If your doctor’s visit is an hour-long block on your schedule, then as many of those 60 minutes as possible should be spent engaging with your physician, not waiting to see them while paperwork is processed.

Uninterrupted facetime between patients and physicians is the cornerstone of quality care, and it’s crucial to find a primary care physician who prioritizes individualized attention. By reducing the amount of time spent on administrative work between 15-minute appointments, physicians can get to know their patients’ cases in detail, get to the root cause of illness, and become their patients’ best advocates. Of course, not all healthcare settings are conducive to this kind of attentiveness, but if that’s what you’re looking for in your primary care, then it’s important to search for a doctor who possesses a few key qualities.

File Paperwork Ahead of Time

The less time that’s spent on clerical or administrative work when you’re physically at your doctor’s office, the better; it means more time can be dedicated to your actual appointment. If you’re looking for a new doctor, it’s a good idea to find a practice that lets you submit your patient paperwork electronically ahead of time. This will significantly cut down on your in-office waiting time. It’ll also allow your physician to review your files before you arrive, giving them a baseline of knowledge about your history and current conditions before they see you face-to-face. This simple step can make a huge difference in your in-office experience.

See a Concierge Physician

If you’re too busy for the doctor, then there’s no better solution than looking into a concierge physician. Concierge medicine is a relationship-based approach to patient care. It means that you have 24/7 access to your physician, whether that’s by phone, email, or text. It also means that you get priority appointment bookings to fit your busy schedule.

The idea behind concierge medicine is that an ongoing relationship between the patient and physician allows the doctor to be their patient’s best possible advocate. It allows the physician to have an ongoing understanding of their patient’s health conditions, which equips them to make quality recommendations when it comes to exercise, nutrition, medication, sleep, and any other lifestyle factors that may contribute to the patient’s wellness. It means not just treating symptoms as they emerge once or twice a year, but getting to the root cause of illness through ongoing quality care.

Get Ahead of Your Symptoms

Concierge medicine better equips doctors to not just know the details on their patient’s chart at a glance, but to understand the unique health profile and goals of each patient. Wellness is about so much more than the symptoms that present when you’re sick. It’s an ongoing journey that, together, the physician and patient can work on every day. Whether your goal is to treat a specific condition or pain, to improve some aspect of your health, or to simply maintain a healthy lifestyle, concierge medicine allows you to work with your physician to come up with a one-of-a-kind healthcare plan that evolves as you do. This means addressing not just your pain, discomfort, and other symptoms, but treating their underlying causes so that you can truly achieve your best health.

If it feels like you’re too busy for the doctor, the solution is to make sure that you have continuous access to a physician who makes every minute count. To learn more about the benefits of concierge medicine, be sure to contact us.

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