Estimating a Reasonable Patient Panel Size for Primary Care Physicians With Team-Based Task Delegation

PURPOSE

Primary care faces the dilemma of excessive patient panel sizes in an environment of a primary care physician shortage. We aimed to estimate primary care panel sizes under different models of task delegation to nonphysician members of the primary care team.

METHODS

We used published estimates of the time it takes for a primary care physician to provide preventive, chronic, and acute care for a panel of 2,500 patients,...