A common complaint is that doctors these days are spending more time doing clerical tasks.
Examples include filling out pre-authorization forms, talking to health plans for pre-certifications on imaging studies, and spending time jumping through bureaucratic hoops. Generally, you do not need a medical degree to do these tasks.
Bob Doherty points to a study that gives some numbers to back up the claims. Primary care doctors spend about 3.5 hours a week doing paperwork, compared to 2.1 hours for surgical specialists. Each doctor is backed up by clerical support staff, who do 7.2 hours of work per doctor daily.
That seems to be a lot of wasted time and money.
Mr. Doherty extrapolates the numbers further, and images the amount of time and money saved if paperwork was streamlined: “[It] could be enough to pay the annual health premiums for three families, multiplied by every practicing physician in the U.S, based on average premium cost of $12,000 per family. It would allow each primary care physician to see another four or five patients per week, thereby reducing wait times and easing the primary care shortage. It would increase primary care physicians’ incomes by an equivalent of $32,000 per year – more than many of the ideas for increasing primary care pay being considered by Congress.”
But before you can say “Medicare-for-all,” remember that the both Medicare and Medicaid have onerous paperwork requirements as well, at times exceeding the requirements of private plans. And with a public plan looming, it looks like the trend will be tilted towards more, not less, paperwork.
Related posts:
- How do you reduce paperwork for doctors?
- How to get doctors to embrace health care reform
- Once you hit Medicare age, good luck finding a primary care doctor
- Reducing the paperwork burden on primary care
- Medical students want to become primary care doctors, until reality hits
- Older primary care doctors can’t retire
- Op-ed: Doctors’ pay cuts save little in health costs
{ 7 comments }
Didn’t you vote for Obama ? You should be happy.
Some of the paperwork is necessary, and I understand that. But most of it is just crap and SCUT.
If the democrats succeed in creating their dream of a Post Office, Motor Vehicle Bureau style health care system “reform,” the amount of paperwork will be a liitle, tiny, itsey-bitsey bit more than we have now from government forms.
What happened to using the VA as the role model. I did 3 rotations there as an MS3 and MS4 and loved the system.
Low on encumbrance and already used in every state in the union.
Oh wait… nobody makes money selling it. Guess it gets shot down since nobody who votes will make any cash pushing it.
I think that after our office implements EMR, I will long for the leisurely and relaxed days of manually filling out paperwork! See http://mdwhistleblower.blogspot.com/2009/04/electronic-medical-records-fear-factor.html
It’s one of my major frustrations… already! Still in my residency (neurosurgery), but the downside of the paperwork is that by times, it demotivates me for the rest of my job as well. Why make quite a lot of hours, bear all the responsibilities and do my homework, if my actual activitities mainly consist of paperwork and phone calls.
Recently I checked it on an average morning when it was a little hectic (when not?): of the 4 hours effective working time, I did 10 minutes face to face with patients. All the rest was filled with being a “personal health manager”.
Maybe we change our job titles in that… and ask a big car from the company!
make all billing filing electronic;
and force all insurance companies to use identical simple forms; approved by the government oversight board.
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