A July 14, 2026, MGMA Stat poll found that 46% of medical groups reported new-patient appointment wait times have stayed the same year to date compared with the same period in 2025, while 28% said wait times are longer and 22% said they are shorter. Another 4% were unsure. The poll had 197 applicable responses.

The same question a year earlier produced a more scattered picture. In a July 1, 2025, poll, 40% of groups reported no change, 31% reported longer waits and 26% reported shorter ones. Both movement categories shrank this year and the middle grew: Fewer groups gained ground on access, and slightly fewer lost it.

All respondents in this week’s poll were asked what, if anything, their organization changed this year to influence patient access and wait times. The answers sort the poll better than the percentages do.

What practices changed this year

The follow-up question drew the same answer from every corner of the poll: add providers.

• Among those reporting longer waits, respondents described aggressive hiring, new advanced practice providers (APPs) and extended hours.
• Among those reporting shorter waits, the credit went to new physicians, new APPs and, in one case, a bigger facility with more exam rooms.
• Among those reporting no change, the list was the same. Sorted by effort rather than by outcome, the responses fall into three recognizable groups.

Of the respondents reporting no change who elaborated, roughly one in five said plainly that nothing changed — and at least one of those had no reason to change anything, reporting current waits of one to five days.

The rest of that group had a busy year. They described hiring more providers, adding associate doctors and support staff, increasing provider days, adjusting daily schedules, standardizing templates, opening same-day slots, adding online check-in and building a better waitlist. One rebuilt the physician schedule to share appointments with APPs, filling the APP schedule while the physician moved between rooms. All of that produced a flat number. For those practices, this year’s result is what running hard enough to stay in place looks like.

The third group ran just as hard and lost ground anyway.

• Most of the respondents reporting longer waits who elaborated described substantive changes — aggressive hiring, two more physicians, another APP, another office, staggered slot release times, centralized scheduling, a new patient-engagement platform — and watched waits lengthen through all of it.
• The causes they named sat upstream of the schedule: a community pulmonologist retiring, a surgeon lost, a physician leaving the practice, a rural service area that expanded, transplant patients relocating into the market, and patients choosing to switch in on reputation.
• One leader put the arithmetic plainly: The number of patients needing care exceeds the providers available, and community growth is doing the rest.
• Another named a cost that any group that spent the past year on no-shows — the top access priority for most practices to start the year — should recognize: established patients returning at higher rates, with fewer no-shows and cancellations. Retention and reliability wins consume the same slots new patients need.

That is the finding underneath the topline. Practices that changed nothing sometimes landed in the same place as practices that hired and rebuilt their templates. Practices that hired landed in all three outcome groups. Even the 22% reporting shorter waits described the same moves as everyone else — added providers, self-scheduling, template adjustments, more slots dedicated to new patients, an access task force. The actions were close to identical across the poll; the results were not. What varied was demand — whether it grew, held or left.

The workforce math behind the hiring

Among clinicians billing Medicare’s physician fee schedule, the number of primary care physicians (PCPs) slipped from 138,000 in 2019 to 133,000 in 2024 — an average decline of 0.7% a year — while the number of advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) and physician assistants (PAs) climbed from 258,000 to 348,000, an average annual gain of 6.2%, according to MedPAC’s March 2026 report to Congress. Utilization followed the supply: APRN and PA encounters per beneficiary rose 11.8% in 2024, against 1.7% for PCPs. Those counts cover clinicians substantially participating in fee-for-service Medicare, so that is not a true look at the whole workforce, but the composition shift does matter for hiring.

Part of that decline is a drain that this poll caught directly. Some PCPs have stopped accepting insurance altogether, moving into direct primary care or concierge models that recent estimates tally a few thousand clinicians each. Those physicians are still practicing — they have left the pool of clinicians insured patients can reach, which is part of why the fee-schedule-billing count falls even as the physicians behind it keep seeing patients. One respondent reporting shorter waits had made exactly that move, saying the practice had “gone to concierge subscription model.” Shortening a wait by shrinking a panel works for that practice; for patients still trying to schedule in that community, those appointments now sit behind a retainer or outside insurance entirely.

This also can help explain why “hire another physician,” in practice, ends up being “hire an APP.” Nearly half of medical groups (48%) added APPs relative to physicians over the past year to maintain patient access, according to MGMA Stat polling. This increased utilization and demand for APPs is reflected in APP compensation growth outpacing physician gains over the past five years, as noted in the 2026 MGMA DataDive Provider Compensation and Productivity data report. What opens a physician template is usually a clear rule about which visits can start somewhere else.

What the national benchmarks measure

AMN Healthcare’s 2025 Survey of Physician Appointment Wait Times — a staffing-firm benchmark, but the most widely cited one — put the average new-patient wait across six specialties in 15 large metro areas at 31 days, up from 26 days when the survey was last conducted in 2022. That comparison is not quite like-for-like: Gastroenterology entered the survey in 2025 at 40 days, the slowest of the six specialties measured, and across the five specialties present in both years the 2025 average is 29.3 days.

For groups reading the survey as a benchmark, the methodology matters more than the number. AMN’s researchers asked for the first available new-patient appointment, and the report notes that in larger groups this request typically routes to the physician with the most open schedule — often a new physician still building a panel. The benchmark therefore tracks the newest provider’s availability, which is precisely what a new hire changes. One respondent to this poll named the gap directly, reporting shorter waits from “more providers but the same amount of patients.”

The MedPAC access-to-care survey report measures the same question from the patient’s side. Among people who looked for a new primary care provider in the prior year, 38% of Medicare beneficiaries and 28% of privately insured people ages 50 to 64 got a first appointment within two weeks. Two findings there speak directly to this poll: Respondents most often looked for a new primary care provider because their previous one had retired or stopped practicing, and rural beneficiaries reported shorter new-patient waits for primary care than urban ones — 57% within two weeks, versus 33%.

When a shorter wait is a demand signal

Shorter and stable are not automatically wins, and several comments say so outright. One respondent with shorter waits credited a partial retirement and a competitor opening nearby. Among those reporting no change, one described adding “providers we don’t need,” another said the focus was filling slots rather than freeing them, and a third attributed flat demand to an economy keeping patients from scheduling at all. That is a schedule with holes in it, and it shows up on the P&L before it shows up on an access dashboard. [Read our June 30 poll findings for more about ACA Marketplace enrollment shifts for another example of demand shifts.]

Where to look next

Segment the measurement. A single average new-patient wait can hide serious variation by specialty, location, provider, payer, referral source and visit reason. Tracking new-patient waits alongside third-next-available appointment, schedule fill rate, cancellation and no-show rates, template utilization and referral aging is how a group finds where access is breaking rather than confirming that it is.

Separate true capacity shortages from template leakage. A specialty can look full while unused capacity sits behind provider-specific holds, late template releases, hard-to-book visit types or conservative rules nobody has revisited. Every hold type deserves the same four questions: Who owns it, when does it release, how often does it get used, and what happens if it stays open? Holds with a clinical reason stay; the rest are worth reopening. Cancellations belong in the same review — MGMA’s guidance on designing backfill and overbooking rules by specialty covers the mechanics.

Route new-patient demand by clinical need. A new patient with an abnormal imaging result, a post-discharge need or a time-sensitive referral belongs on a different pathway than a routine consult that can safely wait. Scheduling rules that distinguish urgent need, routine specialty care, second opinions and visits that can start with an APP, a nurse visit or a diagnostic workup are what turn added capacity into available appointments.

Improve the front door before adding more doors. Using technology to cut avoidable contacts can beat trying to staff up the phones, but governance decides whether it helps. If patients can self-schedule into the wrong visit type, access gets worse. If online requests land in a queue with no service standard, the delay has only moved from phone to portal.

Read the July 14 results as a diagnostic rather than a scorecard. Longer waits point to where the operating model is under strain: capacity, template design, staffing or access workflow. Shorter waits deserve one more question before they get logged as a win — did demand hold? Pair the wait-time number with new-patient volume and schedule fill rate for the same period. If the wait shortened while both held, the operational changes worked, and they are worth extending to the specialties that did not move. If the wait shortened while volume fell, the next decision is a referral, marketing or panel decision rather than a template one.

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