You already know how this goes. Something has been bothering you for a few weeks. Nothing dramatic, but enough that you finally decide to get it looked at. You call. The next available appointment is over a month out. You take it, because what else is there to do, and by the time the date arrives you have either forgotten half of what you meant to ask or convinced yourself it was nothing.
Then the visit itself is over before you have finished the first thing on your list.
If that pattern feels like it has gotten worse, you are not imagining it. It has, and there are now good numbers on exactly how much.
The wait is the longest it has ever been measured
AMN Healthcare has been surveying physician appointment wait times for two decades. In its most recent survey, covering 1,391 physician offices across fifteen large metro areas, the average wait to see a physician reached 31 days, up 19% since 2022 and 48% since 2004. For family medicine specifically, the average was 23.5 days.
That is the longest wait in the survey's history, and the trend line has not turned around.
What makes it worse is how many people have no doctor to wait for in the first place. The Milbank Memorial Fund's 2026 Primary Care Scorecard found that 29.7% of American adults have no usual source of care: no physician who knows their history, no established place to start. That figure has ticked down slightly from 30.9% the prior year, but among children it moved the wrong way, rising from 12.4% to 13.9%. Primary care physicians now make up just 26% of all U.S. physicians, at a supply of 67 per 100,000 people, and the AAMC projects a national shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.
The real math is stranger than a staffing shortage
Here is the part that surprises most people. Even if your doctor could see you tomorrow, the visit itself is running against arithmetic that does not work.
Researchers at the University of Chicago calculated what it would actually take for one primary care physician to deliver every guideline-recommended service (preventive screenings, chronic disease management, acute care, counseling) to a standard patient panel. The answer was 26.7 hours per day.
Not a long day. More hours than a day contains. The same researchers noted that a well-staffed team-based model, with roughly 65% of those services delegated across a care team, brings the figure down to 9.3 hours, which is the honest counterpoint, and also a reminder that how a practice is built determines what it can actually deliver.
Meanwhile, the documentation load has quietly overtaken the visit. A study published in JAMA Network Open tracking 307 physicians across 31 practices found that a roughly 30-minute primary care visit generates 36.2 minutes of electronic health record work, including 6.2 minutes of after-hours charting and 7.8 minutes of inbox management. Your physician is now spending more time writing about your visit than sitting in it with you.
None of this is a story about physicians who stopped caring. It is a story about a system that asks one person to hold a very large panel of patients, and then measures them on throughput.
What patients say they want has not changed at all
While the system optimized for volume, patients kept asking for something else entirely.
In Zocdoc's annual report, covered by Medical Economics, patients ranked positive personal connection as the single most important factor in choosing a physician, ahead of ratings and office proximity. In the company's booking data across millions of appointments, 84% returned to the same provider for follow-up care. Ninety-three percent of non-mental-health visits were still conducted in person, including 92% among Gen Z, the group most often assumed to prefer everything virtual.
People want a doctor who knows them. They have been consistent about this for years.
And it turns out that preference is not just emotional. A systematic review published in the British Journal of General Practice in August 2025, pooling 18 studies covering roughly 15 million patients, found that higher continuity with one personal physician was associated with 10–15% lower premature mortality, 10–15% fewer hospital admissions, and 10–20% fewer emergency department visits. Seeing the same doctor over time is not a comfort feature. In the research, it behaves like a clinical intervention.
Panel size is the whole story
If the constraint is arithmetic, then the fix has to be arithmetic too.
That is the entire structural argument behind smaller-panel practices. The DPC Alliance's State of Direct Primary Care 2026 found that among membership-based physicians with mature panels, most cluster in the 400 to 700 patient range, against a traditional benchmark commonly cited at around 2,000. Nothing magical happens at 600. There is simply enough room in the week for a physician to answer the phone, run a visit long enough to get to the second and third concern, and follow up on the labs without it becoming a scheduling problem.
The physician satisfaction data points the same direction: the American Academy of Family Physicians reported that 94% of family physicians in direct primary care described themselves as satisfied with their practice, versus 57% of those outside it, with burnout at 12% compared with 46%.
A physician who has time is a different physician to be a patient of.
What this looks like in Lubbock
At Omri Med, this is the reason membership is limited by design rather than by accident. Our concierge practice is built so that Dr. Sima Shahbandar, who is board-certified in internal medicine, can be reached directly by phone, text, and email, including after hours, and so that an appointment can run as long as your questions actually take.
Practically, that means preventive care that gets scheduled instead of postponed, chronic conditions managed with someone watching the trend line rather than the single reading, and referrals, labs, and imaging coordinated by a team that already knows your history. It also means the small things get asked about. The concern you would not have called about, but would mention if you were already sitting down with someone unhurried. Those are often the ones that matter.
Omri Med is a private-pay concierge practice and is not a replacement for insurance. What it is designed to change is the wait, and what happens once you are finally in the room.
Start with a conversation
If the pattern at the top of this article felt familiar, that is worth a conversation, not a commitment. The first step is a straightforward talk about your health, what has been falling through the cracks, and whether this kind of practice fits how you actually want to be cared for.
Reach out through our contact form or call (806) 778-4395, and we will start with your questions. You can also meet Dr. Shahbandar and the Omri Med team first, if you would rather know who you would be talking to.
Sources
- AMN Healthcare, 2025 Survey of Physician Appointment Wait Times (globenewswire.com)
- Milbank Memorial Fund, 2026 Primary Care Scorecard (milbank.org)
- AAMC, New AAMC Report Shows Continuing Projected Physician Shortage (aamc.org)
- University of Chicago Medicine / Journal of General Internal Medicine (uchicagomedicine.org)
- JAMA Network Open, EHR time study, via AMA (ama-assn.org)
- Zocdoc annual report, via Medical Economics (medicaleconomics.com)
- British Journal of General Practice, August 2025, continuity systematic review (bjgp.org)
- DPC Alliance, State of Direct Primary Care 2026 (dpcalliance.org)
- American Academy of Family Physicians, FPM (aafp.org)
This article is for general educational purposes and is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it does not create a physician-patient relationship. Individual results vary, and no outcome is guaranteed. Treatment decisions should be made with a qualified physician who knows your full medical history. Omri Med is a private-pay concierge practice; membership is limited and does not replace health insurance.