The 10 Minutes Between Check-In and the Doctor: Why It Is Wasted and How to Fix It

Picture this. You walk into a walk-in clinic. You hand the receptionist your health card. They type your name into the system. They hand you a clipboard with a form, or they do not, and they simply say, "Have a seat, we will call you." You sit down. You wait. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty. Forty. You scroll your phone. You watch the door to the hallway, waiting for someone to call your name. Eventually they do. You follow a nurse to a small room. You sit on the exam table. You wait some more. Then the doctor walks in, glances at their screen, and says: "So, what brings you in today?"

Everything between the moment you checked in and the moment the doctor asked that question was dead time. Nothing clinical happened. No information was gathered. No preparation was made. The doctor knows your name and your health card number, and nothing else. They are starting from zero.

This is the reality of patient self check-in clinic workflows across Canada, and it represents the single largest efficiency gap in walk-in care today. The good news: it is entirely fixable.

For the broader context on how patient intake works in walk-in clinics, see our complete guide to patient intake for walk-in clinics.

The Anatomy of a Wasted Walk-In Clinic Visit

To understand why the time between check-in and the doctor is wasted, it helps to map the entire patient journey in a typical Canadian walk-in clinic. Here is what it looks like, minute by minute:

Minute 0: Arrival and check-in. The patient walks in and approaches the reception desk. They hand over their provincial health card. The receptionist verifies their identity, enters them into the system, and gives them a wait time estimate (which may or may not be accurate). Some clinics hand out a paper intake form at this point. Most do not.

Minutes 1-30 (or more): The idle wait. The patient sits in the waiting room. They are not doing anything clinical. They are not being asked about their symptoms, their medications, their allergies, or their medical history. They are just waiting. Ontario averages 59 minutes at this stage. British Columbia averages 93 minutes, according to Medimap data.

Minute 30+: Called to the exam room. A staff member calls the patient's name. The patient walks to a room, sits on the exam table or a chair. Often, there is another wait here. The doctor is finishing with the previous patient, reviewing notes, or catching up between visits.

Minute 35+: The doctor enters. The physician walks in. They may have a chart or screen showing the patient's name and health card number. They may have a paper form with a one word chief complaint: "cough" or "back pain." They know almost nothing about why this patient is here.

Minutes 35-40: The interview begins. "What brings you in today?" The doctor asks about symptoms, duration, severity, associated symptoms, medications, allergies, past medical history. This takes three to five minutes for a simple complaint, longer for complex presentations.

Minutes 40-50: The actual clinical work. The physician examines the patient, forms a differential diagnosis, orders tests or writes a prescription, documents the encounter. This is the only part of the visit that requires a doctor.

Notice the gap. Between minute 0 and minute 35, the patient was present in the clinic but no clinical information was gathered. Between minute 35 and minute 40, the doctor was gathering information that the patient could have provided at any point during their 30+ minute wait. The doctor is the most expensive, most time constrained resource in the clinic, and they are spending the first several minutes of every encounter doing work that does not require their expertise.

The Double-Ask Problem

There is an additional frustration layered on top of this wasted time, and patients notice it immediately.

In clinics that do hand out a paper intake form, the patient dutifully fills in their name, date of birth, allergies, medications, and a brief description of their complaint. They hand it back. They wait. The doctor eventually enters the room and, despite the patient having filled out a form, asks them the exact same questions.

"What brings you in today?" "Are you on any medications?" "Any allergies?"

The patient just wrote all of this down. The doctor is asking again because either they did not receive the form, did not have time to read it, could not read the handwriting, or found the information too vague to be useful. "Sore throat" on a form tells the doctor almost nothing. They need to know when it started, whether it comes with fever, whether the patient has been around someone sick, whether they have a history of strep throat.

This double-ask problem has two costs:

Patient frustration. The patient feels like their time filling out the form was wasted. They feel unheard. This is a top driver of negative patient satisfaction scores.
Doctor time wasted. The doctor is repeating a process that should have happened once, properly, before they entered the room. Three to five minutes multiplied by 40 patients per day is two to three hours of physician time spent on redundant information gathering.

The double-ask problem exists because the tools used to collect patient information, paper forms, basic check-in systems, are not designed to produce information that is clinically useful to the physician. They collect data. They do not prepare clinical context.

Why This Time Is "Wasted" (Not Just "Waiting")

There is an important distinction between waiting and wasting time. Waiting is sometimes unavoidable. The doctor is with another patient, and you are next in line. Wasting time is when a resource (in this case, the patient's attention and the available minutes before the doctor visit) sits idle when it could be productive.

The 10 to 30+ minutes between check-in and seeing the doctor is wasted because:

The patient is idle. They are sitting in a chair, contributing nothing to their own care. They have information the doctor needs, symptoms, history, medications, concerns, but nobody is asking for it.
The doctor has no information. When the doctor finishes with the previous patient and picks up the next chart, they have almost nothing to work with. They are walking into the room "cold", with no clinical context, no preparation, no efficiency gain from the patient having been present in the clinic for 30 minutes.
The clinic is losing throughput. Every minute of the doctor's time spent on basic information gathering is a minute they are not spending on clinical decision making. If you could recover even five minutes per patient, a clinic seeing 40 patients per day gains over three hours of physician capacity.

This is not a minor inefficiency. With 6.5 million Canadians lacking a family doctor (Canadian Medical Association) and the median healthcare wait time reaching 30 weeks (Fraser Institute), walk-in clinics cannot afford to waste a single minute of physician time on work that could happen in parallel.

The Opportunity: What If Waiting Time Was Working Time?

Here is the key insight: the patient is already in the clinic. They are already waiting. They are already willing to participate in their care. They filled out the clipboard form, did they not? The problem is not patient willingness. The problem is that nobody is using their time effectively.

What if, instead of handing the patient a clipboard and telling them to sit, the clinic handed them a tablet that asked intelligent, adaptive questions about their symptoms? What if, during the 15 to 30 minutes they are waiting anyway, the patient was having a structured conversation about their health, one that produces a clinical summary the doctor can read in 30 seconds before walking into the room?

This is what patient self check-in clinic technology can become when it is designed around clinical value rather than administrative convenience. The patient's waiting time becomes working time. The dead minutes between check-in and doctor become the most productive minutes of the visit.

The concept is called parallel processing. While the patient is providing clinical information on a tablet, the doctor is finishing with the previous patient. When the doctor is ready, they open the pre-screening summary and have everything they need. No cold start. No double-ask. No wasted time.

For a detailed walkthrough of how this process works step by step, see our guide to how AI pre-screening works.

Before and After: The Doctor Walks In

The difference between a cold start visit and a pre-screened visit is vivid. Here is what both look like:

Without Pre-Screening

The doctor picks up the chart. It shows: Jennifer M., DOB 1988-04-12. Chief complaint: headache.

The doctor walks into the room.

"Hi Jennifer, I am Dr. Patel. So, what brings you in today?"

"I have had a headache."

"Okay. When did it start?"

"About four days ago."

"Can you describe the pain? Is it throbbing, dull, sharp?"

"Kind of throbbing. On the right side."

"Have you had headaches like this before?"

"Yeah, sometimes. But this one is worse."

"On a scale of 1 to 10?"

"Maybe a 7."

"Any nausea or vomiting?"

"A bit nauseous yesterday."

"Any visual changes? Flashing lights, blurry vision?"

"No."

"Neck stiffness?"

"No."

"Any fever?"

"I do not think so."

"Are you on any medications?"

"Just birth control."

"Any allergies?"

"Penicillin."

This exchange takes three to five minutes. The doctor is now where they should have been when they walked in: informed enough to begin clinical reasoning and examination.

With AI Pre-Screening

The doctor opens the pre-screening summary on their screen:

37-year-old female presenting with right-sided throbbing headache x 4 days, rated 7/10 severity. Gradually worsening. Associated mild nausea, no vomiting. Denies visual changes, photophobia, neck stiffness, fever. Reports similar headaches in the past, approximately monthly, but current episode more severe than typical. No recent head trauma. Medications: OCP (oral contraceptive pill). Allergies: penicillin (rash). No significant PMHx.

The doctor reads this in 20 seconds. They walk into the room.

"Hi Jennifer, I am Dr. Patel. I see you have been dealing with a pretty bad headache on the right side for about four days, and it is worse than your usual headaches. Let me ask you a couple of quick things and then we will take a look."

Jennifer's face changes. She feels known. She does not have to explain everything from scratch. The doctor already understands her situation. The visit moves immediately to clinical reasoning and examination.

Time saved: Three to five minutes per patient. Information quality: Dramatically higher. Patient experience: Transformed.

Patient Self Check-In Clinic Technology: What Exists Today

The technology landscape for patient check-in and intake has evolved significantly, but not all solutions are created equal. Here is the spectrum:

Basic Self Check-In Kiosks

These allow patients to check in electronically, confirming their identity, updating demographics, and sometimes entering a one line chief complaint. They reduce receptionist workload but do not gather clinical information. The doctor still walks in cold.

Digital Intake Forms

These move the paper clipboard to a tablet or patient's phone. Patients answer the same static questions digitally. Handwriting legibility improves, data enters the system automatically, but the questions are still generic and the output is still shallow. Better than paper. Not transformative.

AI Powered Pre-Screening

This is the current leading edge. A conversational AI system conducts an adaptive clinical interview on a tablet in the waiting room. It asks targeted follow-up questions based on the patient's specific complaint, builds a structured clinical summary, and delivers it to the physician before they enter the room. This is the approach that converts waiting time into clinical preparation.

The patient intake software market is projected to grow from $1.8 billion to $4 billion by 2031 (Allied Market Research), and 40% of urgent care centres have already adopted some form of AI triage (Becker's Hospital Review). The shift is happening because the ROI is measurable and immediate.

For a comparison of these different approaches, see our analysis of how to improve patient flow in walk-in clinics.

The Psychology of Productive Waiting

There is a well-established principle in service design: perceived wait time is more important than actual wait time. A patient who waits 20 minutes doing nothing feels like they waited longer than a patient who waits 20 minutes doing something meaningful.

Research on wait time psychology shows that:

Unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time. A patient scrolling their phone for 20 minutes perceives a longer wait than a patient answering health questions for 20 minutes.
Unexplained waits feel longer than explained waits. A patient who knows they are completing a pre-screening that will help the doctor is more tolerant than a patient who has no idea what is happening or when they will be seen.
Anxiety makes waits feel longer. Patients are anxious about their health. Answering questions about their symptoms gives them a sense of agency and progress, which reduces anxiety.
Unfair waits feel longer. When patients see others being called before them with no apparent logic, frustration grows. A clear, transparent process builds trust.

AI pre-screening addresses all four dimensions. The patient is occupied, they understand why, their anxiety is channelled into productive activity, and the process feels structured and fair.

The result: even if the actual clock time does not change dramatically, patients report higher satisfaction because their wait felt purposeful rather than pointless.

The Impact on Walk-In Clinic Wait Times in Canada

The wasted minutes between check-in and the doctor are not just an inconvenience. They are a systemic bottleneck that compounds across every patient, every day. Canada's walk-in clinics are under historic pressure. The country has the longest healthcare wait times on record, and walk-in clinics are absorbing the overflow from a primary care system that cannot keep up.

Every minute recovered from the dead zone between check-in and doctor translates directly into:

More patients seen per day. If each doctor visit is five minutes shorter because the cold start problem is eliminated, a clinic seeing 40 patients per day can see an additional six to eight patients without extending hours.
Shorter queue times. Faster throughput means the waiting room clears faster, which means the next patient waits less.
Lower LWBS rates. An estimated 30% of walk-in patients leave without being seen (Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine). Shorter perceived waits and a more engaging check-in process directly reduce LWBS. For more on this crisis, see our analysis of why patients leave walk-in clinics.
Reduced physician burnout. Repetitive history taking is one of the most draining aspects of high volume clinic work. Eliminating it preserves cognitive energy for the clinical reasoning that only the doctor can do.

How to Fix the Wasted Minutes in Your Clinic

If you are a clinic owner or manager reading this, here is a practical starting point:

Step 1: Time it. Track how long patients wait between check-in and seeing the doctor. Track how long doctors spend on initial information gathering in the exam room. Multiply the second number by your daily patient volume. That is the time you can recover.

Step 2: Identify what information the doctor needs before entering the room. Talk to your physicians. Ask them: "If you could know three things about the patient before you walked in, what would they be?" The answer is almost always: chief complaint with detail, medications, and allergies. A good pre-screening system captures all of this and more.

Step 3: Choose the right technology level for your clinic. Basic digital check-in is an improvement over paper. AI powered pre-screening is a generation beyond that. The right choice depends on your budget, patient volume, and willingness to change workflows. But any step up from the clipboard and wait model is a step in the right direction.

Step 4: Pilot and measure. Start with a subset of patients or specific time slots. Measure intake time, doctor consultation time, total visit time, and patient satisfaction. The data will make the case for full rollout.

FAQ

How long does AI pre-screening take compared to sitting idle?

A typical AI pre-screening session takes five to eight minutes. Since this happens during time the patient would otherwise spend sitting idle, it adds zero time to the visit. In fact, it reduces total visit time because the doctor enters the room already informed and can move directly to examination and treatment. The net effect is that a five to eight minute pre-screening saves three to five minutes of doctor time per patient.

What if the patient finishes pre-screening before the doctor is ready?

This is actually the ideal scenario. It means the clinical summary is ready and waiting when the doctor becomes available. The patient returns to waiting after completing the pre-screening, but their wait is now purely due to the queue (the doctor seeing other patients), not due to any intake inefficiency. The doctor can review the summary at their convenience before entering the room.

Does this work for clinics that already use electronic medical records (EMRs)?

Yes. AI pre-screening is an additive layer that sits between check-in and the doctor visit. It does not replace the EMR. It feeds structured information into the physician's workflow so they are prepared before entering the room. The pre-screening summary can be accessed alongside the EMR, and in many cases can be integrated directly.

What about patients who arrive with emergencies?

AI pre-screening systems should include triage logic that identifies urgent presentations (chest pain, difficulty breathing, signs of stroke, severe allergic reactions) and immediately flags them for staff. These patients bypass the standard queue. For non-urgent presentations, which represent the vast majority of walk-in clinic visits, the pre-screening process applies.

Is the information from AI pre-screening reliable enough for doctors to act on?

AI pre-screening does not generate diagnoses. It gathers and organizes patient reported information. The reliability of the information is the same as what the patient would tell the doctor verbally; the difference is that it is structured, complete, and available before the visit begins. Physicians verify key points during the consultation, just as they would verify anything a patient tells them. The structured format actually makes verification faster and more reliable than trying to reconstruct a verbal history.

How does this affect patient satisfaction?

Clinics that implement pre-screening consistently report improved patient satisfaction scores. Patients feel that their time is being used productively rather than wasted, and they report feeling more "heard" when the doctor enters already informed about their situation. The productive wait replaces the frustrating idle wait, which transforms the patient's perception of the entire visit.

The minutes between check-in and the doctor do not have to be wasted. Hilthealth turns walk-in clinic waiting time into clinical preparation. Patients share their symptoms on a tablet, and doctors walk in ready to help. Learn more about how AI pre-screening works, or contact us to see how Hilthealth can transform the dead time in your clinic.