Providing primary care in the United States: the work no one sees.

P ractice redesign efforts to improve the efficiency of primary care practice and increase the volume of patients primary care providers are able to care for must take into account all tasks associated with the provision of care, including those outside the faceto-face encounter that often go unrecognized. In the present study, we empirically measured a wide breadth of outpatient care tasks associated with the provision of primary care over the course of an entire year in a large group of academic general internists, adjusted for actual number of work days and number of patients seen, to accurately assess the total work associated with provision of primary care in the outpatient setting.