Table 2 Time use-related questions in focus group interview guide

If your health center wanted you to measure the effort/time you are spending on a particular task to understand the time burden, what would be your ideal method for doing that?

• “…So the actual calls are pretty easy to track. So we can just be like, ‘Okay. I make calls from this time to this time. And this is how many calls that we made.’ So that’s pretty easy to track. We can either put it on the calendar or put it into an Excel sheet.” (Site B)

• “…We felt that we since we are tracking through a spreadsheet, we’re going to just create a column so that when they call patients, every time– the amount of time that they spend, they just document it as part of the process. So they felt that was one of the easier processes.” (Site C)

[FQHC] used [list methods]. Let us start with [method 1], what would have made that easier? What was hard about [method 1]? [Repeat for additional methods.]

• “[Administrative task] is a little bit more tricky to track how much time we’re actually putting into [task] because often, it’ll be over the course of several days waiting for an email to come back.” (Site B)

• “…If there is a way that you can calculate the time from when the MA opens the chart to the time that a side provider opens the chart, … I think that’s the closest as you’re going to get in live documentation… But the problem with that is, …if at the end of the visit the provider does their piece but sends the MA … back in to do the teaching, I’m not really sure that time would be found in a measurable way …” (Site C)