ArticleHealth economics2012
Time is up: increasing shadow price of time in primary-care office visits.
Article in Health economics, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pragmatic Clinical Trial of Population Health, Portal-Based Depression Screening: the PORTAL-Depression Study.Journal of general internal medicine · 2023Trial
- Trial
- Primary care physicians' experiences with inbox triage.JAMIA open · 2025Article
- The Effects of Displaying the Time Targets of the Manchester Triage System to Emergency Department Personnel: Prospective Crossover Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- Visit Linearity in Primary Care Visits for Patients with Chronic Pain on Long-term Opioid Therapy.Journal of general internal medicine · 2022Article
- Docs with their eyes on the clock? The effect of time pressures on primary care productivity.Journal of health economics · 2021Article
- Article
- R-E-S-P-E-C-T--what it means to patients.Journal of general internal medicine · 2014Article
- Unhurried Conversations in Health Care Are More Important Than Ever: Identifying Key Communication Practices for Careful and Kind Care.Annals of family medicineArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A physician's own time is a scarce resource in primary care, and the physician must constantly evaluate the gain from spending more time with the current patient against moving to address the health-care needs of the next. We formulate and test two alternative hypotheses. The first hypothesis is based on the premise that with time so scarce, physicians equalize the marginal value of time across patients. The second, alternative hypothesis states that physicians allocate the same time to each patient, regardless of how much the patient benefits from the time at the margin. For our empirical work, we examine the presence of a sharply increasing subjective shadow price of time around the 'target' time using video recordings of 385 visits by elderly patients to their primary care physician. We structure the data at the 'topic' level and find evidence consistent with the alternative hypothesis. Specifically, time elapsed within a visit is a very strong determinant of the current topic being the 'last topic'. This finding implies the physician's shadow price of time is rising during the course of a visit. We consider whether dislodging a target-time mentality from physicians (and patients) might contribute to more productive primary care practice.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.