ClinicOps / Briefings / The 13-hour burden
Operations Guide · Published Jul 28, 2026
Prior Auth Takes 13 Hours a Week Per Physician. Here Is the System That Fixes It
Thirteen hours of physician and staff time, every week, for every doctor. That is the prior authorization burden on a medical practice. Here is where the time goes, why more staff is not the answer, and the system that gives it back.
Jareer Ali·
Research & field notes·
8 min read
The prior authorization burden is the time a practice loses getting payers to approve care before it is delivered. It runs about 13 hours of physician and staff time per physician each week, on roughly 40 requests. The fix is not more people. It is one tracked process that removes the coordination waste.
Key takeaways
- Prior authorization consumes 13 hours of physician and staff time per physician every week (2025 AMA Prior Authorization Physician Survey).
- Physicians now complete about 40 requests a week, up from 39 in the 2024 survey.
- 40% of practices already employ someone who works only on prior auth, and the burden still persists. That tells you it is not a headcount problem.
- The time drains through coordination gaps: no owner per request, no follow-up alarms, no expiration tracking.
- A single tracked process claws most of the time back without adding a salary.
Thirteen hours. That is the physician and staff time your practice spends on prior authorization every week, for every doctor, according to the 2025 AMA Prior Authorization Physician Survey. Nearly two full working days. On paperwork that no payer reimburses.
You already feel it. The question worth answering is not whether prior auth is a burden. It is where those 13 hours actually go, and why throwing people at the problem has not made it disappear.
Where the 13 hours actually go
Almost none of it is clinical. The hours drain out through coordination: confirming which services even need authorization, keying the same clinical notes into three different payer portals, sitting on hold, and chasing decisions that should have been automatic. Then, when a request is denied or an approval quietly expires, the clock starts over. That last one is its own quiet leak, which is why we wrote a separate guide on authorizations that expire before the visit.
The 13 hours are not the cost of doing prior auth. They are the cost of doing it without a system. A request with no owner gets forgotten. A submission with no follow-up date ages until the patient calls. An approval with no expiration date lapses, and the whole thing runs again from the top.
Why more staff does not fix it
The instinct is to hire. And 40% of practices have: they employ someone whose entire job is prior authorization (2025 AMA survey). Yet the burden has not eased. If adding people solved this, two in five practices would already be free of it.
Hiring without a documented system buys you a single point of failure with benefits. When that person is out sick, on vacation, or gone, the process goes with them, because it lived in their head. The work is not hard. It is uncoordinated. You cannot hire your way out of a coordination problem. You have to build the coordination.
The tracker and denial log we build for clients, packaged for you to keep. Chart numbers only, ready for ClickUp, Monday, Asana, or a spreadsheet.
Get the free Rescue KitThe system that claws the time back
You do not need new software or a new hire. You need five things wired into the tools you already pay for.
| The piece | The time it gives back |
|---|---|
| One tracker, one source of truth | No more hunting across inboxes, sticky notes, and memory |
| A named owner per request | Nothing gets forgotten because "the team" was handling it |
| A follow-up alarm cadence | Following up stops being a memory test at 48 hours, 5 days, 10 days |
| A denial log | Appeals become a fast task, and you spot the pattern that keeps costing you |
| Expiration tracking | No approval lapses, so no request ever has to be redone from scratch |
That is the whole system, and it is a build you can put in place this month. Keep reading to put it in place:
- Prior Authorization for Independent Practices: the complete operations guide
The full seven-stage process and the system that seals each leak.
- Free prior authorization tracking spreadsheet
Gives you the first four pieces out of the box, free to download.
- Prior authorization by the numbers (2026)
Eight sourced figures for the case you are building internally.
- Case Study: How a 3-Physician Practice Stopped Auth Expirations live
A documented case study of how a 3-physician practice stopped prior auth expirations with a.
What 13 hours a week really costs
Put it in plain terms. Thirteen hours is most of two working days, every week, on work you can never bill. Across a year, that is the better part of an entire staff position spent on coordination that a board and a set of alarms would handle in the background. The money is not leaking through some exotic failure. It is leaking through a Tuesday nobody had a system for.
The fix does not make prior auth pleasant. Payers still make it hard. But it moves the burden from 13 hours of scramble to a tracked process your team runs on rails, and it stops the second bill entirely: the denials and lapses that make you pay twice for work you already did.
Find your leak before you fix it
Two ways to start, both free.
Take the tracker and denial log and run it yourself, or book a 20-minute Leak Audit where we put a real number on what your prior auth process is costing, using your own volume.
Frequently asked questions
How much time does prior authorization take?
On average, prior authorization consumes 13 hours of physician and staff time per physician, every week, and physicians complete about 40 requests a week, according to the 2025 AMA Prior Authorization Physician Survey.
Can you actually reduce the prior authorization burden?
Yes, but rarely by hiring alone. The burden is a coordination problem: no owner per request, no follow-up alarms, no expiration tracking. A single tracked process removes most of the wasted time without adding headcount.
Does hiring dedicated prior auth staff fix it?
It helps, but 40% of practices already employ staff who work exclusively on prior auth, and the burden persists. Without a documented system, a dedicated hire is a single point of failure who takes the process with them when they leave.
Is prior authorization time reimbursed?
No. Prior authorization is unreimbursed administrative work. That is exactly why 13 hours a week matters: it is time you pay for and never bill.