Harvard Calculated the Cost of Waiting for a Doctor – and It’s Crazy

A study from Harvard Medical School supports what we already know – online care saves you time and money. In the study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers looked at the time spent by nearly four thousand people seeking in-person medical care and then calculated the dollar value of their lost time.

They found that the average total visit time for typical in-person medical visits was 121 minutes. This includes 37 minutes in travel time and 84 minutes in the clinic waiting and filing in paperwork.  Of the 84 minutes, only 20 minutes were spent face-to-face with a doctor.

When the researchers translated that time into money, the total cost for the 121 minutes was equal to $43. Overall, employed adults in the United States spent an unnecessary 1.1 billion hours of time and $25 billion annually seeking medical care.

With Amwell, you don’t have to sit in your doctor’s waiting room thinking about the things you could be doing.  It takes an average of 15 minutes to log-on, connect with a doctor and have a face-to-face visit all in the comfort of your home.

So what does this mean for you? You have more time and money to do the things that made you happy.  Skip to the head of the line and see a doctor on Amwell in minutes.