Continuity of care is valuable.
While the paper’s methodology requires some significant guesswork, “Health Care Expenditures Attributable to Primary Care Physician Overall and Burnout-Related Turnover: A Cross-sectional Analysis” by Sinsky et al attempts to estimate the cost of primary care physician (PCP) turnover.
They combined several data sources to estimate excess expenditures and then used a large survey to estimate the proportion of PCPs leaving due to burnout (by assuming that 25% of those who claimed they intended to quit in the next few years due to burnout actually did).
Their result?
Turnover of PCPs results in approximately $979 million in excess health care expenditures for public and private payers annually, with $260 million attributable to PCP burnout-related turnover.
What a waste.