A peer-level look at how family physicians and general practitioners manage the competing demands of older-adult visits, from cognition and mobility to medication risk, vaccination, functional decline, and digital workflow support.
Audience: Family Physicians / General Practitioners
Countries: 6
Completion Rate: 74.8%
SGID: 8946574
-Hero findings
– Quick Read — Key Findings
The challenge is not identifying relevant domains. It is turning a broad, person-centred agenda into something that can reliably happen inside everyday primary care.
WHO’s 2025 Integrated Care for Older People guidance and the Age-Friendly Health Systems 4Ms framework (What Matters, Medication, Mentation, Mobility) make the same operational point: healthy aging is multi-domain by design, not a sequence of isolated disease checks.
The MDForLives survey sits inside that reality, asking family physicians and general practitioners how long routine visits take, what they prioritize, what they struggle to cover, and which workflows and digital tools might create more capacity.
Finding 1
34.8% allocate more than 20 minutes to routine wellness or chronic-care visits for patients aged 65+, while 32.3% report 16–20 minutes.
The largest group already runs past 20 minutes and 32.3% sit at 16–20, yet consultation time is still the dominant barrier to cognitive screening later in the survey. Even with a third of clinicians over 20 minutes, 48.3% in Finding 3 name visit time as their top barrier, so the real constraint is the number of domains competing for the visit, not the minutes on the calendar. When medication, gait, cognition, vaccination, nutrition, and what matters most can all be relevant in one encounter, even a longer slot feels compressed.
36.3% rank polypharmacy and deprescribing as the single highest priority, but 39.0% say cognitive screening and dementia evaluation are the hardest healthy-aging domain to address adequately.
Medication risk is the most selected top priority, followed by mobility and fall risk at 22.7%, while cognition is a top priority for only 13.9% yet the clear leader in difficulty at 39.0% (medication review is second-hardest at 21.9%). That inversion is the real signal: the domains most at risk of being squeezed out are not the least important, but the ones that demand the most uninterrupted conversational and interpretive time. Medication decisions can anchor to a concrete list; cognitive assessment needs sensitive conversation, collateral history, and planning after a positive concern.
48.3% identify insufficient consultation time as the primary barrier to conducting routine cognitive screening in older adults.
Consultation time leads by a wide margin, with patient or family resistance at 17.5%, specialist access 12.7%, lack of concise tools 12.4%, and limited action after diagnosis 9.2%. The barriers a new product would solve are minor next to time, so the finding argues for redesigning the visit rather than adding an instrument, and it aligns with Finding 5, where 31.7% already pre-screen with the team. It should not be read as a call for indiscriminate testing: the USPSTF finds insufficient evidence for universal screening of asymptomatic older adults, so this reflects what makes assessment difficult when clinicians judge it warranted.
33.7% say new difficulty with complex daily tasks such as medication management or finances most often goes unnoticed by patients and families.
Difficulty with complex daily tasks leads at 33.7%, ahead of muscle or grip loss at 24.4%, slower gait or balance at 21.0%, fatigue or social withdrawal at 13.0%, and weight loss or appetite change at 7.9%. The most-missed signals are functional, while the classic red flag of weight loss is missed least, so early decline tends to hide as lost capability rather than an obvious symptom. Medication errors, missed bills, a weaker grip, or a slower gait may each look minor alone, but together they can signal declining reserve, which is why asking what has become harder since the last visit can catch what a symptom-led review misses.
34.3% say routine geriatric screening is conducted entirely by the physician, while 31.7% use medical assistants or nurses to pre-screen before physician entry.
Physician-only screening (34.3%) and team pre-screening (31.7%) are nearly tied, with self-assessment at 10.6%, referral at 8.3%, and 15.1% who screen only when acute symptoms appear, the reactive group to watch. Task-sharing is already about a third of practice, but the judgment stays in the physician-patient conversation, a pattern medication management echoes: 37.5% credit shared decision-making with patients or caregivers, ahead of dedicated review visits (28.5%), pharmacist review (23.1%), and structured tools (10.9%). The tool matters, but the decision still has to make sense to the person taking the medicine.
30.4% select EHR-integrated clinical decision support as the digital or AI tool with the greatest potential to improve healthy-aging management over the next two to three years.
EHR decision support (30.4%) narrowly leads ambient scribes (28.5%), followed by pre-visit questionnaires (22.4%) and remote monitoring or wearables (18.6%). The top two take nearly 59% and both hand time back inside the workflow, while the option that adds a data stream to monitor ranks last. Immunization reinforces the point: a proactive recommendation during the consultation leads at 38.3%, ahead of EHR alerts (24.4%), standing orders (18.6%), and dedicated clinics (18.6%), so the preference is for technology that protects the visit and surfaces the next decision rather than one that generates more to watch.
The survey does not show clinicians struggling to recognize that older-adult care is complex; it shows them making trade-offs inside that complexity. Polypharmacy is the most common top priority, cognition the hardest domain to fit, and consultation time the leading barrier to cognitive screening. Functional decline may first appear in complex daily tasks, screening stays largely physician-led even as team pre-screening grows, and the digital tools with the strongest appeal are the ones that reduce workflow burden or put decision support into the EHR.
The open-ended responses point the same way: clinicians repeatedly call for more time, longer appointments, home visits, social work, and stronger community and geriatric support. These are not requests for another checklist but for a care model that connects the clinic to the patient’s function at home and distributes work across a wider team.
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Common practical questions about older-adult assessment, cognition, medication safety, mobility, and prevention.
Direct answers to the questions healthcare professionals are most likely to ask about these findings.
