Points clés à retenir
- Administrative burden limits existing capacity: Physicians spend up to a full day per week on non-clinical tasks, directly reducing time available for patient care and contributing to access challenges.
- Targeted efficiency gains unlock meaningful time: Improvements across billing, on-call management, and scheduling can free up 30–60 minutes per day, scaling to millions of hours annually across the system.
- Net impact on access to care: Reclaiming even a portion of this time translates into capacity equivalent to thousands of physicians—helping close access gaps while longer-term workforce solutions take effect.
Canada’s healthcare system is under real pressure. Physician shortages are well documented, patient demand continues to rise, and access to care remains a challenge across the country.
Addressing this gap requires multiple solutions converging together. The thought of a silver bullet solution such adding mass numbers of doctors is both challenging in the short-term and unrealistic overall. It takes a confluence of training and attracting more physicians, plus rethinking how care is coordinated and existing physician time is optimized.
This means leveraging an overlooked opportunity for meaningful impact today:
Unlocking the capacity of the physicians already in the system.
How does this translate to 7,000 physicians?
Research suggests that reducing administrative burden could free up enough physician time to be equivalent to thousands of additional doctors, often framed as “adding” 7,000+ physicians to the system.
- ~95,000 physicians practicing in Canada
- ~20% of their time spent on administrative work (≈1 day/week)
- If even one-third of that time is reduced, it frees up ~7–8% of total physician capacity
The result:
95,000 × 7.5% = approximately 7,000 additional physician-equivalents
This isn’t about eliminating all administrative work; it’s based on partial, realistic efficiency gains applied to the health system at scale.
The overlooked constraint: Time
Physicians today are balancing clinical responsibilities with a growing volume of administrative work that includes billing commitments, scheduling, paperwork, and coordination.
In many cases, this adds up to nearly a full day each week.
The impact is twofold:
- Less time available for patient care
- Increased burnout and reduced job satisfaction
Even as the system works to bring in more physicians, this administrative load continues to limit the capacity of those already practicing.
According to a report from the College of Family Physicians in Canada, the average family doctor spends approximately 15–20 minutes seeing patients for routine appointments. Thus, every hour saved in administrative time each week means at least three more patients being seen every week.
Which raises an important question: How much additional access to care could we unlock by giving physicians more of their time back?
A practical path forward: Three steps to reducing administrative burden
Administrative burden isn’t a single issue. It shows up across multiple workflows. But some areas consistently stand out as high-impact opportunities for improvement:
- Billing operations workflows
- On-call and workforce management
- Scheduling and resource coordination
These are not abstract challenges. They are daily, operational realities for healthcare organizations, and they are increasingly solvable.
1. Billing operations: Reducing friction in a high-frequency task
Billing is one of the most frequent administrative tasks physicians perform and one of the most complex.
Manual entry, evolving fee codes, and claim reconciliation all contribute to time spent away from patient care.
Targeted improvements in billing workflows have an outsized impact:
- Automating code suggestions and validation reduces errors and rework
- Streamlining claim submission shortens time per interaction
- Standardized workflows reduce cognitive load for physicians
Petal’s work with healthcare organizations has shown that modernizing billing processes significantly reduces the time physicians spend navigating administrative requirements.
Because billing happens so frequently, even small efficiencies per claim translate into meaningful time savings over weeks and months.
Clinicians using Petal Billing reported 9.4% more revenue and 161 hours saved on average annually.
2. On-Call management: Bringing order to a complex system
On-call scheduling is essential for continuity of care, but often relies on manual coordination, fragmented tools, and last-minute adjustments.
This creates a persistent administrative burden:
- Time spent building and updating schedules
- Back-and-forth communication to manage changes
- Limited visibility into coverage gaps
Digitizing on-call and workforce management helps reduce this overhead:
- Automated schedule generation decreases planning time
- Real-time updates minimize communication loops
- Centralized visibility improves coordination and reduces errors
Organizations that have adopted more structured approaches to on-call management report not only time savings, but also improved reliability and physician experience.
3. Scheduling: Improving access without increasing workload
Scheduling sits at the intersection of access and efficiency.
When scheduling processes are fragmented or manual, the consequences are felt across the system:
- Unused clinical capacity
- Delays in patient access
- Increased administrative workload
More coordinated scheduling approaches enable organizations to:
- Better align physician availability with patient demand
- Reduce gaps and inefficiencies
- Simplify booking and coordination workflows
Improving how resources are allocated has shown to increase patient throughput, without requiring physicians to work longer hours.
The University of Montreal Hospital Centre reduced planning time by 98% using Petal.
From efficiency gains to improved access
Each of these areas, whether billing, on-call management, scheduling, offers incremental improvements on its own.
But together, they create compounding gains.
For example:
- Saving 30–60 minutes per day per physician
- Across a large network of providers
- Over the course of a year
This adds up to millions of hours ready to be redirected toward patient care.
That’s where the idea of “adding” thousands of physicians comes from, not by expanding the workforce alone, but by making better use of the one we have.
Why this matters alongside workforce expansion
Canada does need more physicians. Training, recruitment, and retention remain critical priorities.
But these efforts take significant investment, cross-functional alignment from health authorities and governments, and more of all, it takes time.
Reducing administrative burden offers a complementary path:
- It delivers impact in the near term
- It supports physician well-being and retention
- It helps ensure that new capacity isn’t lost to inefficient processes
In other words, it strengthens the foundation of the system while broader workforce strategies take effect.
A more balanced approach to capacity
Framing administrative efficiency as “adding 7,000 doctors” is a useful way to illustrate the scale of the opportunity, but it’s not the full story.
The real goal is more practical: Enable physicians to spend more of their time on the work they do best. Care for patients.
Even partial reductions in administrative burden translate into meaningful improvements in access, experience, and system performance.
Now is the time
Canada’s healthcare challenges require both long-term investment and near-term action.
By reducing administrative burden in key areas like billing, on-call management, and scheduling, healthcare organizations unlock meaningful capacity within the existing workforce.
This won’t replace the need for more physicians, but it will help ensure that every available hour of care is put to its best use.
And in a system under pressure, that makes all the difference.
Explore how Petal can help your team simplify workflows, reduce billing rejections, and strengthen financial performance.
