What's a Click Worth? The Hidden Cost of DPC Inefficiency

Clicks Feel Free. They're Not.

Nobody opens a DPC practice and thinks about the cost of a mouse click. But here's a number worth sitting with: the average DPC physician performs somewhere between 500 and 1,000 unnecessary clicks per clinic day. Tab switches, redundant searches, re-navigating to tools you already had open, scrolling to find the right window in a sea of tabs — these are clicks that don't advance patient care. They're pure overhead.

And overhead has a price. If your time is worth $150 per hour — a conservative number for a DPC doc billing $100/month memberships with a 400-patient panel — then every wasted minute costs $2.50. A single unnecessary click takes 2–5 seconds. Doesn't sound like much until you multiply it by 700 clicks across a full clinic day. That's roughly 35 to 60 minutes of wasted time, which translates to $87 to $150 in lost productivity — every single day you see patients.

Over a year, that's $20,000 to $35,000 in time you can't bill for, can't use for patient care, and can't spend with your family. All from clicks that felt free.

The Cost-Per-Click Calculation

Here's how to run this for your own practice. It's not complicated, and the result will probably irritate you.

Step 1: Estimate your effective hourly rate. Take your annual revenue, subtract overhead, divide by the hours you work per year. For most solo DPC docs, this lands between $100 and $200 per hour.

Step 2: Track your unnecessary clicks for one clinic day. Count every tab switch, every time you search for a tool you already had open, every redundant patient lookup across different platforms. Be honest. Most docs land between 500 and 1,000.

Step 3: Multiply clicks by average time per click (3 seconds is a reasonable middle ground), then convert to minutes and multiply by your per-minute rate.

The formula: (Unnecessary Clicks × 3 seconds) ÷ 60 × (Hourly Rate ÷ 60) = Daily Cost

For a doc earning $150/hour with 700 unnecessary clicks per day, that's: (700 × 3) ÷ 60 × $2.50 = $87.50 per day.

That's not a rounding error. That's a real cost with a real fix.

Where the Clicks Hide

The biggest click sinks in a DPC workflow aren't where most people think. It's not the complex EHR documentation or the carefully considered clinical decisions. It's the connective tissue between tools:

• Tab-switching: Every time you move between your EHR, lab portal, messaging app, and Rx tool. This alone accounts for 200–400 unnecessary clicks per day for most DPC docs.
• Redundant patient lookups: You search for "Smith, Jane" in your EHR, then search for "Smith, Jane" again in Quest, then again in your e-prescribing tool. Same patient, three searches, because the tools don't share context.
• Window hunting: You know the lab portal is open somewhere, but which tab is it? You click through four tabs before you find it. Those four clicks are pure waste.
• Re-navigation: You were looking at a lab result, switched to your chart, and now you need the lab result again. Back you go — another click, another few seconds of re-orienting.

None of these clicks feel expensive in isolation. But they're the most frequent actions in your day, and frequency is what turns pennies into real money.

How Tabflows Cuts the Click Tax

Tabflows eliminates the majority of these unnecessary clicks by putting your entire workflow on one screen. When your EHR, lab portals, messaging, and Rx tools are all visible simultaneously, you don't tab-switch — you just look. You don't hunt for windows — they're already positioned where you put them. You don't re-navigate — the context is persistent.

The reduction is dramatic. Tab-switching clicks drop to near zero because there are no tabs to switch between. Redundant searches decrease because you can see multiple tools at once and navigate them in parallel. Window hunting disappears entirely because your layout is fixed and predictable.

Conservative estimates from DPC practices using Tabflows suggest a 60–70% reduction in unnecessary clicks per clinic day. On a base of 700 clicks, that's 420–490 clicks eliminated. At $0.12 per click, you're recovering $50–60 per day — or $12,000–$15,000 per year in productive time. That's time you can reinvest in patient care, panel growth, or simply going home earlier.

Stop Paying the Click Tax. Start Practicing.

Every click between browser tabs is a tiny invoice your practice pays in lost time and lost focus. Tabflows eliminates the unnecessary ones — so the clicks you do make are the ones that actually move patient care forward.