[I write a weekly column for HealthcareWealthcare, a physician practice and financial management portal. This column was recently posted to that site. It is crossposted here at Doctor Pundit.]

Patient wait times and its cumulative effect on the bottom lines of primary care practices is nothing new. In the era of economic uncertainty in both the overall economy and the healthcare sectors, revisiting this issue is necessary to effect some control over a controllable source of revenue loss. It is no secret that longer wait times negatively influence patient satisfaction rates. At a time when patient visits are down overall because of such factors as loss of patient coverage and healthcare systems’ provider staffing, it may be a daunting task for practices to combat these factors. Perhaps looking at this issue as an avenue of possibility rather than practice liability, practice managers can minimize certain patient dissatisfaction. Therein lies the key.

Studies have documented that, although longer wait times are generally associated with patient dissatisfaction, the time spent with physicians in the office was a stronger predictor of patient satisfaction. When primary care physicians and their practices are looking for ways to enhance revenue, the focus should be on the quality of the patient visit and not the number of visits during any given day. As the recession continues to have an impact on the reasons patients continue to see their physician, practice managers must take step to ensure those visits not only provide quality for the patient, but also loyalty.

As a function of the provider-patient relationship, patients give physicians considerable leeway in wait times as long as their perceptions of the visit are influenced by the quality of the time spent with the physician. Practice managers and their provider staff are acutely aware that patient-centered measures of healthcare quality are influenced by long wait times and short provider times. As patients continue to seek primary care physicians for their myriad complaints, they are either waiting longer to do so — until their problems become intolerable — or are fashioning visits to take care of as many chronic issues as possible.

Primary care practices should take note and consider that the needs of the patient are paramount. Attacking this problem from the point of view of simply shortening wait times is problematic because defining practice quality in terms of the variable of patient wait times — which for many practices may be a tempting measure to increase revenue in the short term — adds up to a toxic combination of shortening wait times at the expense of quality patient visits, reducing patient loyalty, re-visits, and, ultimately, decreased revenue. All of this painfully could roil practices’ operational budgets and overhead during these troubled economic hits to the healthcare sector.

At a time when cuts to Medicare and Medicaid threaten patient access to primary care practices even further, those practices should continue to search for ways to ensure patient loyalty, retain quality provider staff, and work with already strained operational budgets. The last thing that practice managers need to tackle is the uncertainty wary patients — who are able to continue to have access to their primary care provider — may project if they are not satisfied with the care they receive. They simply will not be able to afford it.

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