PanelWise helps organizations shift from binary open/close decisions to setting new patient targets for each provider based on their individual panel sizes.
The art of managing panel size lies in knowing your patients, communities, providers, clinics and unique capabilities. When you pair that with a scientific, data-driven approach, plans are rooted in reality and results follow.
How many patients can one doctor manage? Mark Murray posed that question in a landmark 2007 paper, and his supply-demand framework became the standard starting point for panel sizing. PanelWise takes that framework, refined through 10+ years of real-world application inside a 2,000-provider medical group, to calculate panel size for each provider individually.
| Visits for Your Panel | Visits Per Patient | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The total visits a provider and their care team generate. Includes visits from APPs supporting that provider's panel. | The number of visits per patient for that provider's panel of patients. |
| Accounts for |
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| Bottom line | A provider who sees 20 patients a day can have a larger panel than a provider who sees 16. | A provider who sees their patients 2.5 times per year can have a larger panel than a provider who sees their patients 3.5 times per year. |
How many patients are on this provider's panel today. Defining a panel requires two decisions, and different answers produce meaningfully different panel sizes.
When did a patient need to be seen last to be considered active?
Who is the patient's primary care provider?
PanelWise can mirror your existing attribution logic or show you alternatives side by side so you can compare how different rules change panel size and composition.
Every year providers lose patients from their panel. Patients move, change insurances, pass away or stop visiting primary care. Attrition is both an outcome to plan for and a signal to monitor.
A provider whose panel is full will lose 5-15% of their patients to attrition. To keep their panel stable, they must see enough new patients to replace those that leave. High attrition rates are a signal that the patient-provider relationship is being disrupted. Analyzing trends and variation between clinics, providers and patient populations is vital.
The traditional approach is picking a single benchmark and applying to all physicians, with adjustment for clinical hours. This approach leads to over-empanelment for some and under-empanelment for others. The numbers leaders are looking at don't match the reality in the clinic.
PanelWise replaces that guesswork with provider-specific calculations built from your own data so providers, clinic leaders and executives can align around the same picture of what panel capacity actually looks like.
Articles from Jason Harris on LinkedIn exploring panel management concepts in depth.