A family friend was talking to a doctor who was considering quitting.
The reason why, at least for that doctor, wasn't really the stress from patients. It was all the damned paperwork and the stress that created.
The reason why, at least for that doctor, wasn't really the stress from patients. It was all the damned paperwork and the stress that created.
One of the PTs I know spent at least as much time filling out paperwork as he did with patients. This was partly due to the volume of paperwork required by govt / insurance / lawyers / whatever, and partly due to absolutely awful software.
Result. Spent 2 years trying to work when I couldn’t get out of bed and was mostly blind.
All because doctors didn’t want to spend 20 minutes filling out forms. Plus Disability companies lie constantly until various deadlines pass.
He was admittedly older and had never particularly embraced computers and so forth.
(And then my new PCP retired during the pandemic.)
https://www.elationhealth.com/
Speaking from personal experience, moonlighting as a paramedic, paperwork is a universal challenge in healthcare (I often spend more time documenting a call than the call itself took from patient contact to transfer of care to the ER). It is shockingly rare for EHRs (regardless of the speciality they focus on) to actively try to make life better for the clinician. That's a large part of why I'm at Elation for my day job; the founders (and therefore the whole company) have a ton of empathy for the doctors (and staff) we serve.
For people with chronic conditions a PCP makes sense, for the rest of us it is just another pointless loop you have to jump through.
1. A few doctors left practices after they got taken over by a bigger entity and the hoops they had to jump trough weren't worth it, so they retired.
2. The insurance companies - they control EVERYTHING. One thing that happens a lot is that they don't allow her to order an MRI unless she orders an X-Ray first - even if what they're testing for wouldn't show up on an X-Ray. And this slows down the process of diagnosis by days. There are more examples of things like this - things that should be up to the provider, but end up being up to the insurance company (what drug to prescribe or what treatment to pursue first) - it makes no sense (at least from what I hear from her).
FHIR would be a good idea, but in practice its hard to correlate a patient across the systems. Few hospitals and doctors setup a push notification for when they change a patient's record.
Essentially all of the software needs to be redone with a focus on a centralized record tracking system. The rewrite needs practitioners (all of them, not just Docs, but the lowly CNA too) to drive the requirements. Admins should be included, but not the target of day to day UI.
How much could it cost to pay someone else to do this? Surely less than a doctor makes doing it... It can become its own profession. It's a separate skill - separate from what a doctor should be focusing on.
On a side note, it seems that a lot of professions would benefit from having an assistant - a thing that seems to have disappeared - if what I've seen in old movies in shows is to be believed. Another side-case of this is the fact that technical people tend to be promoted into management roles and have to deal with attendance and time-sheets - why not have someone else do it? The work only suffers.
The Scribe had a laptop and could look up whatever info was needed while the doc was doing his thing. If a scrip is needed the scribe types it in to the system and then the doc had to read it and approve.
Just keeping the docs hands clean from not having to touch a dirty laptop/iPad all the time has a health benefit I bet.