The Burnout on Both Sides of the Exam Table

Nearly half of all physicians in the United States are experiencing at least one symptom of burnout.

At the same time, patient satisfaction with primary care has been declining for years. Wait times are longer. Appointments feel shorter. And a growing number of Americans, more than 28% as of 2021, don't have a consistent source of primary care at all.

We treat these as separate problems. They aren't.

They are two symptoms of the same structural failure. And until we name that failure clearly, neither physicians nor patients will get the care they deserve, one as providers, the other as recipients of it.

I've practiced in both environments. I spent over seven years in a large health system before founding Blossom Family Medicine, a concierge primary care practice in Arlington Heights, IL. What I want to share here isn't a sales pitch for a different model. It's an honest account of what I saw, what the data shows, and why I believe the conversation needs to change.

The Numbers Are Not Abstract

According to the American Medical Association's 2024 national physician comparison report, 43.2% of physicians reported experiencing at least one symptom of burnout, down from a pandemic peak of 53% in 2022, but still representing nearly half the profession. Physicians are 82% more likely to experience burnout than the average U.S. worker after controlling for age, gender, and hours worked, according to a Stanford Medicine study published in 2025.

Family medicine and internal medicine (the front door of primary care)  consistently rank among the highest burnout specialties. These are the physicians patients rely on most for continuity, prevention, and coordination of complex care. They are also the most structurally constrained.

On the patient side, the average primary care appointment in the U.S. lasts between 7 and 18 minutes. The average wait for a new patient appointment was 26 days in 2022, and in many markets, it is significantly longer. Since 2018, more than 25% of American adults have reported having no usual source of care, a figure that continues to rise despite a population that is aging and carrying more chronic disease than any previous generation.

The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of 86,000 physicians in the United States by 2036.

These figures don't exist independently of each other. They are cause and effect, cycling in both directions.

The Structure Is the Problem

I want to be precise about something: physician burnout is not primarily a resilience problem. It is not solved by meditation apps, wellness stipends, or time management training. The 2024 JAMA Network Open study on primary care time constraints described it clearly. Physicians are operating inside a structural mismatch between the work they are expected to do and the time they are given to do it. The result is constant tradeoffs: tradeoffs in the depth of care delivered, and tradeoffs in their own lives.

The volume-based reimbursement model, in which a practice's financial survival depends on patient throughput, creates a ceiling on what any individual physician can provide regardless of their skill, dedication, or intention. A physician seeing 25 to 30 patients per day is not cutting corners out of indifference. They are operating within a model that makes depth structurally impossible.

What that looks like from the patient side: questions that don't get asked. Symptoms that get attributed to the chief complaint rather than investigated in context. Preventive conversations that get deferred. A care relationship that resets with every appointment because there hasn't been enough time to build one.

The burnout and the dissatisfaction are the same structural failure, experienced differently depending on which side of the stethoscope you're on.

What Gets Lost in the Gap

The consequences of fragmented, time-pressured primary care are measurable, and they extend well beyond inconvenience.

Continuity of care with a single physician over time is one of the most consistently supported predictors of better health outcomes in the literature. Patients with continuous primary care relationships have lower rates of hospitalizations, fewer unnecessary specialist referrals, better management of chronic conditions, and lower all-cause mortality. The relationship itself is a clinical variable.

When that relationship doesn't exist because the physician panel is too large, the appointments are too short, or the wait is too long, things get missed. Not because anyone failed. Because the structure didn't allow for success.

For women, this gap is documented and disproportionate. Research consistently shows that women wait longer for diagnoses across a range of conditions, are more likely to have physical symptoms attributed to psychological causes without investigation, and are less likely to have pain taken seriously. These outcomes are not independent of appointment length and care continuity. They are downstream of them.

A Different Structural Answer

Concierge medicine (also called direct primary care) is not the only answer to this problem. But it is one of the clearest demonstrations that the problem is structural rather than inevitable.

When a physician practices with a small, intentional patient panel, the ceiling lifts. There is time for the question behind the question. There is continuity across visits, a physician who remembers not just the chart but the context, the pattern, the thing that was mentioned once six months ago that turned out to matter. There is access when something comes up, which reduces the downstream cost of deferring care.

The research on this model is consistent: direct primary care patients have fewer emergency department visits, lower hospitalization rates, and higher satisfaction scores. Physicians practicing in this model report dramatically lower burnout rates. Both of these outcomes trace back to the same root cause: time, and what becomes possible when there is enough of it.

I founded Blossom Family Medicine because I wanted to practice the way primary care was designed to work. With enough time, enough continuity, and enough relationship to make a genuine difference in my patients' long-term health. That decision came from watching, up close, what happens when those conditions don't exist.

What This Conversation Needs

Physician burnout will not be solved by asking physicians to want it less. Patient dissatisfaction will not be solved by asking patients to expect less. Both deserve a care environment that is structurally capable of meeting them.

That means more investment in primary care, in reimbursement models that reward depth over volume, in physician pipeline development, in policy that takes continuity seriously as a clinical variable rather than a soft preference.

It also means an honest public conversation about what primary care is for, and what it requires to do that job well. The evidence has been consistent for decades. The structure has been slow to follow.

The burnout on both sides of the exam table is telling us something. The question is whether we're listening.

Sources

American Medical Association. (2024). AMA National Physician Comparison Report. AMA Organizational Biopsy.

Shanafelt, T.D., et al. (2025). Physician burnout rates and comparison to U.S. working population. Stanford Medicine / Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Nguyen, M.L.T., et al. (2024). Primary care physicians' experiences with and adaptations to time constraints. JAMA Network Open.

The Physicians Foundation. (2024). Primary Care in Crisis: 2024 Scorecard Report. Milbank Memorial Fund & The Physicians Foundation.

Association of American Medical Colleges. (2024). Physician supply and demand projections through 2036.

Heath, S. (2022). Average patient appointment wait time is 26 days. Patient Engagement HIT.