Breaking down a billion visits: Practice trends, one patient at a time

Physicians say the portrait of care drawn by federal statistics reflects what they see in their offices.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. Sept. 4, 2006.

Are more patients streaming through your office door today than 10 years ago? Does every third person seem to have hypertension? Does the waiting room empty out in the summer and fill back up again come fall? If so, you aren't alone.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has charted these and other trends -- in some cases for more than 30 years -- to provide a statistical snapshot of ambulatory care. AMNews asked several physicians how their practices compared with study conclusions and found, for the most part, the findings are on target.

The tally of outpatient office visits has reached new heights, increasing at a pace three times the rate of population growth over the past decade, according to CDC figures. And the agency's "National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey," released in June, showed more than half of those office visits, or 58.5%, were to primary care offices. It's fair to say, then, that physicians who work in these settings have seen a burgeoning amount of foot traffic.

That's no surprise to family physician Ayaz Madraswalla, MD, who has practiced in Storrs, Conn., for 11 years. He is one of five physicians in an office where only two are accepting new patients. "I had to close my practice to new patients after three or four years," he said. "I had really maxed out on how many patients I could take."

"We average 20 to 25 patients a day," said Dr. Madraswalla, who is also president of the Connecticut Academy of Family Physicians. "We leave two emergency openings in each session -- morning and afternoon -- and, by the end of the day, I would say that everybody is full."