Time management for doctors: Reducing administrative burden to reclaim patient care

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

If someone asked what you love about being a physician, the answer is likely treating your patients – not the constant administrative tasks like documentation, prior authorizations, compliance mandates, and non-stop emails that end up consuming your time.

In 2024, it was reported by the AMA that physicians work an average of 57.8 hours per week, and they spend less than half of that (27.2 hours) on direct patient care. Prior authorizations alone cost physicians and their staff an average of 13 hours per week according to the AMA. The relentless administrative work often triggers burnout, and even drives some physicians to consider alternative careers. 

Administrative overload is often a systemic problem, not a personal productivity failure. A flawed healthcare system generates overwhelming administrative demands, pulling time away from patient care and requiring significant after-hours (often called “pajama time”) charting. A Sermo poll on time management for doctors found that 57% of physicians frequently or almost always sacrifice personal well-being for professional obligation, with 35% saying that reducing administrative burden would have the greatest positive impact on their day-to-day time management. 

So, what can physicians do to reduce administrative burden? The answer isn’t working harder or longer. It’s implementing practical workflow changes to decrease this friction. Often, the most beneficial physician time management strategies are delegating, automating, and standardizing tasks so you can do more of what you love: providing exceptional patient care. 

Physicians on Sermo discuss effective ways to manage their never-ending administrative tasks to reduce burnout without working longer hours – or changing jobs. Join the conversation to hear how your peers are handling it. 

Where do physicians experience the most time burden?

System-generated requirements drive most of the time burden: documentation, EHR inbox management, coding and billing compliance, referral processing, prior authorization, prescription requests, and payer mandates. These responsibilities compete directly with patient-facing care throughout the day, continue after clinic hours, and often cause stress, frustration, and burnout. 

Administrative work during patient visits

“I did not sign up to major in data mining when I went to medical school. I find people who finish on time basically put next to nothing in their notes, and I understand why, but something actually important is likely omitted,” vented a rheumatologist on Sermo.

Across specialties, ambulatory physicians spend an average of 5.8 hours in the EHR for every eight hours of scheduled patient time. Documentation takes the most, at 2.3 hours, followed by chart review, orders, and inbox. These tasks are necessary, but time-consuming and tedious. Clinical specialties that spend the most time in the EHR include infectious disease, endocrinology, nephrology, primary care, and hematology. Conversely, specialties that spend the least time include anesthesiology, orthopaedics, otorhinolaryngology, surgery, and dermatology. 

A Sermo poll found that 35% of physicians want more efficient documentation, yet data shows that documentation requirements have expanded with value-based care mandates. That means physicians must spend more time on each patient encounter, yet  appointment timeslots haven’t increased accordingly. 

Administrative work after patient visits

“I usually find myself working at home for hours trying to finish my documentation. In my subacute work, AI is not helpful with doing documentation for me,” posted a physician on Sermo.

For many physicians, the work doesn’t stop when your shift ends. Increased administrative responsibilities can creep into your personal time as you spend time after-hours managing your overflowing email inbox, referrals, prescription requests, and other tasks —blurring the lines of work-life balance. 

How can doctors reduce their administrative burden?

Small workflow changes can have a significant impact in reducing administrative burden. Below are a few ways you can reclaim time: 

Team-based triage and delegation

Administrative burden is difficult to solve alone. Many of the tasks consuming physicians’ time don’t always require physician-level expertise, but still end up on a physician’s plate. That’s why effective team-based care relies on clear triage processes and high-trust teams that ensure the right work is handled by the right person.

According to Sermo’s poll, 31% of physicians want high-trust teams, illustrating the importance of team-based care.

“Insufficient staffing for unskilled tasks is a huge problem that leads to clinicians completing the work so that it doesn’t impact the patients,” one pediatrician posted on Sermo.

“The ‘efficiency’ expectations for physicians as well as our RNs and MAs are not aligned with the goals of providing quality patient care, creating high-trust teams or promoting employee well-being and longevity,” another geriatrician added to the conversation. 

While staffing constraints remain a reality in many practices, physicians can often reduce administrative burden by taking a structured approach to task management. The goal isn’t simply to work faster, but to determine which responsibilities can be offloaded, automated, or standardized so clinicians can focus more of their time on patient care.

What to offload, automate, and standardize

Many physicians assume the solution to administrative overload is becoming more efficient. In reality, the goal is reducing physician admin time by identifying which tasks can be offloaded, automated, or standardized. This type of clinical workflow optimization can free up meaningful time for patient care without requiring longer hours.

Offload tasks that don’t require physician judgment. Effective physician delegation strategies start with clearly separating work that requires clinical decision-making from work that follows established protocols. Trained staff can often handle tasks like appointment scheduling, insurance verification, refill requests that meet standing-order criteria, normal lab result notifications, prior authorization paperwork, and routine inbox messages. EHR routing rules and team-based message triage can help direct these tasks to the appropriate team member while reserving your involvement for complex clinical decisions, abnormal results, peer-to-peer reviews, and authorization appeals.

Automate repetitive administrative work whenever possible. AI-powered documentation tools, ambient AI scribes, voice dictation software, and virtual assistants can reduce the time spent creating notes and managing documentation. Automation can also support EHR inbox management by sorting messages, drafting responses, and routing requests to the appropriate staff member. For prior authorizations, automated tools can pull relevant clinical documentation, populate forms, and flag missing information before submission.

Standardize the work that must remain with you as the physician. Some administrative tasks cannot be delegated or automated, but they can be completed more efficiently through consistent workflows. Documentation templates, smart phrases, standardized prior authorization summaries, and structured peer-review preparation checklists can reduce the burden of starting from scratch each time while maintaining quality and compliance.

These small, simple changes can save you time and reduce the need for charting after hours.

Time management tools for physicians

Innovative tools can save you time on these recurring responsibilities:

• Documentation – Documentation is a huge part of your job, so your physician time management strategies should prioritize better documentation workflows. Using AI-powered documentation tools is easy and intuitive. Voice dictation, EHR smart phrases and templates, and AI scribes like DAX Copilot, Abridge, and Suki can transcribe conversations and dictated patient notes, saving you an hour or more on this chore. A study published in JAMA Network Open found that using AI-powered documentation tools reduced burnout prevalence by 21 percentage points 84 days after clinicians started using the tools. This AI documentation doesn’t require EHR integration to function, but integration helps eliminate extra work. When AI scribes and voice-to-text dictation tools operate outside the EHR, you’ll need to manually copy and paste the text into the EHR chart – an extra step that can add to your administrative load rather than reducing it.
• Inbox management – Email overload is another major pain point. Gain control of your non-stop messages using AI, EHR inbox management tools, and delegation software. AI tools like Epic MyChart ART can triage, draft, and automate inbox tasks directly within the EHR, saving you time and meeting CMS compliance rules. Message routing rules auto-sort email messages by urgency and type, enabling you to delegate certain messages and tasks to your staff. AI-powered inbox management tools can save you up to two hours per day in administrative time, and they depend on EHR integration to function effectively and efficiently. 
• Prior authorization – AI tools don’t just submit faster, they submit smarter. AI-powered prior authorization tools, including automated eligibility checks, pre-built clinical justification templates, and clinical evidence extraction, improve documentation quality and reduce denials. While these tools don’t require EHR integration, the integration impacts how they operate. For instance, when AI tools are connected to EHRs, you can quickly, easily, and accurately gather relevant clinical data, compare it to payer criteria, and determine whether any information is missing.  
• Scheduling – Scheduling, productivity and task management tools can support efficiency,  optimize your schedule, and reserve dedicated blocks of focus time. Further lighten your load by encouraging staff to schedule appointments and patients to self-schedule future visits.  

“Charting is a large part of the job. In the world of rising AI, better tools that aid with charting and documentation would allow for more time for what matters most, patient care,” posted an OB/GYN on Sermo.

How physicians can compare tools on Sermo

Sermo’s physician community is the peer-tested source to compare time management tools and workflow best practices. Physicians regularly share their personal experiences, explaining which tools save time, which are user-friendly, and whether they are worth implementing into your day-to-day workflows. These peer-based, real-world discussions can help you to determine which solutions will best fit your needs.

Reclaiming time for patient care

A physician on Sermo posted: “The hardest part is that, with two young kids at home, it’s both my wellbeing but also my time with my kids that is ticking away. It’s quite difficult to feel I am being forced to choose between my kids and my patients.”

As a busy physician, you don’t need better time management. You need to reduce the friction stemming from a flawed system that causes an overwhelming administrative load. Implementing small workflow changes, including delegating, automating, and standardizing, will help you achieve a more efficient clinical workflow. When you lighten your workload, you’ll increase time for patient care, reduce stress and burnout and improve your work-life balance.

Join Sermo’s physician community to discuss how you’re managing the ongoing administrative load that today’s physicians face, and share which workflow changes helped you reduce these burdens. Connect with industry peers who have the real-world knowledge and experience to provide advice you can’t get anywhere else.