Many doctors lament the fact that they spend almost as much time on paperwork than on caring for patients. The healthcare industry involves many different providers, and healthcare reform will not change that.
A recent study found that, on average, physicians spend up to one-third of their working days on documentation and billing. Even with assistants tasked with the bulk of administrative duties, doctors themselves are still responsible for filling out charts and other duties.
How do health insurance companies contribute to this issue? Often times, each insurer has its own set of procedures that must be followed. In order to have a claim fulfilled, the doctor’s office must not make any errors. Otherwise, the corporate bureaucracy can use those errors as an excuse to deny the patient’s claim. In those instances, doctors are not paid for their services.
On the one hand, it’s perfectly understandable that a health insurance plan wants to avoid fraud. Unfortunately, it puts undue pressure on honest doctors and prevents them from paying the the best attention to their patients. As a result, they may have worse health outcomes.
Instead of spending more time with a patient, doctors may take shortcuts by reading notes from previous doctors. Sometimes, those notes are input into patient records incorrectly or fail to be transferred. Therefore, they may undergo unnecessary or even harmful treatments, which are expensive to reverse. Indeed, as health insurance costs have risen, medical residents have doubled the proportion of time spent on billing. There may be a connection.
