The study indicated that reconsidering the supply of physician capacity and demand for appointments from patients can enable a primary care group to do more.

"We also found that the practice could actually take on more patients," said Balasubramanian. "In this environment where there's actually a shortage of primary care physicians, that suggests that if you organize your practice well, then you can actually take on more patients. That's where there is a broader implication, that although it doesn't fix the problem of primary care doctor shortage, it at least eases it in some way in the short term," he said.


Balasubramanian suggested that practices reevaluate the number and type of patients they are seeing. Physicians can gradually take advantage of the inevitable changes that occur in primary care -- old patients leaving and new patients coming in.

"You can use these changes to slowly get to the recommended case mix that the paper suggests," said Balasubramanian. "What I would say is that it has to be a slow change where you're continuously evaluating how you're doing, rather than an abrupt change just because the model suggests that there could be improvements."

The study appears in the current early online issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

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