Let me put a number on it for you: 13 hours per week.
That’s how much time the average physician in America spends on prior authorization paperwork, according to the AMA’s prior authorization physician survey. Not on patient care. Not on research. Not on continuing education. On paperwork — filling out forms, sitting on hold with insurance companies, and re-submitting the same requests over and over because a payer’s system kicked them back on a technicality.
Thirteen hours. That’s almost two full working days, every single week, spent asking for permission to do the job they were trained to do.
The Scale of the Problem
The AMA survey paints a picture that should make anyone paying attention furious:
- The average practice handles 39 prior authorizations per week
- Each one takes a meaningful chunk of physician and staff time
- 35% of medical practices have hired staff whose sole job is to manage prior authorizations
- These aren’t edge cases or complex procedures — this is routine care being gatekept by bureaucratic process
39 prior authorizations per week. That’s roughly 2,000 per year, per practice. Each one is a doctor saying “my patient needs this,” and an insurer saying “prove it.”
Think about what that means in practice. A physician sees a patient, makes a clinical determination based on years of training and the specifics of that patient’s condition, and then has to turn around and justify that decision to someone at an insurance company — often someone with no medical background — using whatever documentation format that particular payer requires that particular week.
The Math Gets Worse When You Follow the Money
Those 35% of practices that have hired dedicated PA staff? That’s not a minor budget item. Depending on the practice size and complexity, a dedicated prior authorization specialist costs between $45,000 and $65,000 annually in salary alone, before benefits and overhead. For a mid-size practice already operating on thin margins, that’s a significant line item that produces zero clinical value.
And here’s the part that really grinds: the physician still has to be involved. You can’t fully delegate a prior authorization because the payer requires clinical justification that only the treating physician can provide. So the practice pays for dedicated staff and the physician still loses hours every week.
The 13 hours isn’t going down. It’s going up.
The U.S. Senate Is Finally Paying Attention
The administrative burden of prior authorization has gotten bad enough that it made it to Capitol Hill. The U.S. Senate hearing titled “The Doctor is Out” examined rising stress and burnout among American physicians, and prior authorization was front and center.
Senators heard testimony from practicing physicians about:
- Treatment delays caused by PA backlogs that put patients at direct medical risk
- Revenue losses from denied or delayed authorizations that take weeks or months to resolve
- Moral injury experienced by physicians who know what their patients need but can’t get the system to move fast enough
- Practice viability concerns as smaller practices struggle to absorb the administrative overhead
The hearing title says it all. Doctors are leaving. Not because they don’t want to practice medicine, but because the system has made it nearly impossible to practice medicine without drowning in administrative overhead.
What 13 Hours Actually Costs
Let’s be concrete. If a physician’s time is valued at even a conservative $150 per hour (well below the average for most specialties), 13 hours per week of PA work represents:
- $1,950 per week in physician time alone
- $101,400 per year per physician
- Time that could have been spent seeing 26 additional patients per week (at a conservative 30 minutes per visit)
Multiply that across the roughly 1 million practicing physicians in the United States, and the aggregate cost is staggering. We’re not talking about a minor inefficiency. We’re talking about a systemic drain on healthcare capacity that directly reduces access to care.
The Real Casualty Is the Patient
Behind every one of those 39 weekly prior authorizations is a patient waiting. Waiting for a medication. Waiting for a procedure. Waiting for imaging that could catch something early enough to make a difference.
The 13 hours a physician spends on paperwork isn’t just an economic problem — it’s a patient safety problem. Every hour a doctor spends on the phone with an insurer is an hour they’re not spending with someone who needs care.
And the worst part? The system was designed to do this. Prior authorization in its current form isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as insurers intended. Friction is the feature. Delay is the product. Every authorization that a physician abandons because the process is too onerous is money that stays in the insurer’s pocket.
Something Has to Change
The data is unambiguous. The Senate is hearing testimony. Physicians are burning out. Patients are waiting. And the administrative burden keeps growing.
At Artificer Health, we’re building technology to attack this problem directly — automating the prior authorization workflow so physicians can spend their time on medicine instead of paperwork. We’re currently onboarding pilot partners who want to reclaim those 13 hours. If that sounds like your practice, we’d love to talk.