Have you ever felt rushed during a visit with your doctor? Felt that you didn’t have a chance to cover all the issues you’d hoped to? If so, research by HCP Professor of Health Economics Thomas G. McGuire, PhD, and colleagues shows that you are not alone. McGuire has been studying the allocation of time during primary care doctor visits, and his research shows that it’s not surprising that you may have felt shortchanged.
McGuire and colleagues Ming Tai-Seale and Weimin Zhang studied videotapes of routine office visits from multiple primary care practices in the United States to measure the length of time each patient spent with the doctor and the amount of time devoted to specific topics. The researchers supplemented the videotapes with surveys of both patients and physicians. The study showed that average office visits lasted just under 16 minutes and covered an average of six topics. Only about five minutes were devoted to the longest topic, with other topics receiving just over one minute of time. The length of the visits overall varied little, even when the contents of the visits varied widely.
Multiple Awards
The study of primary care doctor visits, published in October 2007 in Health Services Research, earned McGuire an article-of-the-year award—one of two he recently received during a year of honors. In addition to the award-winning articles, McGuire was recognized for his work with students, receiving a mentoring award from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
“Physician and Patient Behavior: Time Allocation in Primary Care Office Visits” won the 2008 AcademyHealth Article-of-the-Year Award, together with another related article coauthored by McGuire, “Two-Minute Mental Health Care for Elderly Patients: Inside Primary Care Visits,” which appeared in December 2007 in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society. The Article-of-the-Year Award “recognizes the best scientific work that the fields of health services research and health policy have produced and published during the previous calendar year. The award-winning article provides new insights into the delivery of health care and advances knowledge of the field.” McGuire’s current research includes the study of ways to pay for physician services that improve the quality of primary care.
McGuire also shared the Fourteenth Annual Health Care Research Award from the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) with HCP colleague Richard Frank (each was honored for a separate article). NIHCM sponsors the award “to encourage outstanding work from researchers furthering innovation in healthcare policy and management”; the organization honored McGuire for his paper “Predictability and Predictiveness in Health Care Spending,” coauthored with Randall Ellis and published in the Journal of Health Economics. McGuire has recently published several other articles, including one on racial and ethnic disparities in mental health, published this spring in Health Affairs. Research for all three of McGuire’s award-winning papers was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health.
In addition to his research, McGuire teaches a graduate course on health economics, cross-listed at the Medical School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). This April, in recognition of his powerful impact on students, McGuire received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from GSAS. The Graduate School Council established the award “to honor Harvard faculty members who go out of their way to mentor GSAS students by supporting, encouraging, and promoting their graduate students’ research, education, professional and personal development, and career plans.”
Through his excellence in teaching and mentoring, McGuire is helping shape the next generation of health researchers and policymakers. Through his own award-winning research, he is helping shape the policies that affect the health care we all receive—now and in the years to come.
