ArticleAnnals of family medicine2025
Convenience or Continuity: When Are Patients Willing to Wait to See Their Own Doctor?
Article in Annals of family medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Continuity of Primary Care in Community Health Centers.Annals of family medicine · 2026Article
- Skill mix in primary care, working hours, time used on management, and burnout among general practitioners.Family practice · 2025Article
- Can multidisciplinary teams improve the quality of primary care? A scoping review.EClinicalMedicine · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeMuch of the literature on team-based primary care has focused on physician productivity, workload, and burnout. Less is known about how team-based care influences patient satisfaction and perceptions of the trade-off between continuity and access. This study assessed the preferences of family medicine patients for seeing their primary care physician (PCP) vs other team clinicians based on visit type and wait time.
methodsOur cross-sectional online survey asked patients about their primary care clinics, PCP, portal use, self-reported health, and demographics. For multivariate analysis, we used weighted logistic regression analysis with survey data to calculate maximum likelihood estimates and converted these to odds ratios. We controlled for age and self-reported health as continuous variables and for demographics as categorical variables.
resultsWe surveyed 4,795 adult patients and received responses from 2,516 (52.5%). More than one-half of patients preferred to see only their PCP for an annual checkup (52.6%), follow-up of a chronic condition (54.6%), or follow-up for a mental health condition (56.8%). Similarly, the majority of patients preferred to wait 3 to 4 weeks to see their PCP for issues possibly requiring a sensitive examination (68.2%), a new mental health concern (58.9%), or a new concern about a chronic condition (61.1%).
conclusionsOur findings show that patients value having a PCP and maintaining continuity with their PCP. They also provide insight on when patients would prefer to wait to see their own PCP vs being seen more quickly by another clinician. As health care delivery and scheduling continue to evolve, these findings provide guidance for leaders in primary care.
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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.