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Drive time: How doctors handle commuting

The increasingly choked traffic around the nation's metro areas has doctors gagging over how much it's costing them when they have to get in their cars. Here's how some physicians are dealing with the problem.

By Cheryl Jackson, amednews staff. Aug. 6, 2001.

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You don't have to tune into the traffic report on the radio to know that hitting the road these days can be a hit to the pocketbook. With more time spent commuting and with the unpredictable nature of gas prices, doctors say being in the car is cutting deeper into their practice revenue and lengthening their workdays.

Also, because more physicians are finding that their patients are reluctant to deal with heavier traffic to get to them, doctors more often have to have multiple offices, increasing overhead.

One physician figures that for the additional time he spends on the road these days, he could be seeing an extra patient or two in the office.

Another, tired of the lonely road, brings along a travel companion -- her cat.

Several physicians described the ways longer commutes have impacted them and measures they've taken to cope.

Washington, D.C., cardiologist Stuart Seides, MD, has seen his workday lengthened as congestion grows here.

That's cutting into his wallet, he says.

"Parking is also more expensive. And more scarce," Dr. Seides said. "Increased traffic and congestion affects us. It creates an increased cost in doing business. And nobody is out there [eager] to reimburse us for the cost of doing business." His group, Cardiology Associates, has 17 physicians, based in five metro D.C. offices. He practices out of two of them.

"We find patients are more and more intimidated by traffic considerations and therefore won't come to a downtown site. So you've got to put offices out where the patients are," Dr. Seides said. "Then the doctors are the ones out on the road. And that extra overhead of having two offices rather than one is borne by the physicians. [...]