What is happening to the time spent with the patient ?

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 Some years ago when  I  went  to  our  class  batch of medical school reunion ,the 25the year  Osmania medical college  Alumni Association meeting in Hyderabad, India.

I had some interesting  conversations.

I somehow  nostalgically remebered  the  45  minutes to 1 hour  we had to take a compklete  history of   a patient  when  i was  doing the   Medical rotations .

 My  friends  laughed and  told me they see between 80 to 120 patients daily!

and  if i am cribbing about seeing 25 patient's daily in USA in  a general practice where most of the patients are relatively healthy I have  no reason to crib.

"1 Principles of the 10-Minute Diagnosis

Paul M. Paulman

Ten minutes for diagnosis? Really?

Yes, really!

If only we had 90 minutes to perform a diagnostic evaluation, as we did as third-year medical students on hospital rotations. Or, if we had even 30 minutes for diagnosis, as I recall from internship. But those days are gone. Today—as clinicians practicing in the age of evidence-based, cost-effective health care—office visits are of much shorter duration than in years past. For example, in a recent study of 4,454 patients seeing 138 physicians in 84 practices, the mean visit duration was 10 minutes (1). Another study of 19,192 visits to 686 primary care physicians estimated the visit duration to be 16.3 minutes (2). Even when the total visit duration exceeds 10 minutes, the time actually devoted to diagnosis—and not to greeting the patient, explaining treatment, doing managed care paperwork, or even the patient’s dressing and undressing—is seldom more than 10 minutes."

excerpt from 

Taylor's Differential Diagnosis Manual: Symptoms and Signs in the Time-Limited Encounter