Chances are you didn’t decide to enter medicine because you love paperwork. So we found it dismaying that 60% of physicians surveyed in CareCloud/QuantiaMD’s Practice Profitability Index claim they spend at least one day a week on administrative tasks instead of patient care.
With the digitization of health care, could physicians see administrative relief, or will software result in more complex concerns? In theory, practice management (PM) systems and EHRs provide doctors with a faster, more automated approach to handling tasks and eliminating the reliance on paper. What do you think?
Let’s take a closer look.
Are Doctors Bogged Down in Tedium?
Normally, practices designate administrative, billing and other operational duties to staff. But the PPI shows that, when compounded, the burden created by activities like coding, documentation and other similar tasks are too often falling on the shoulders of physicians.
When asked how much time was spent on “coding, documentation and administration,” rather than patient care, the majority of physicians (59%) said they sacrificed more than 20% of their time this way. What does this mean? A physician may spend an entire day a week behind a desk, away from an exam room.
Even more shockingly, approximately 30% of physicians spend one-third or more of their time on administrative tasks. It doesn’t take PhD level science to notice doctors are bogged down in way too much administrative humdrum.
What Do These Administrative Burdens Look Like?
The entire practice revenue cycle, from scheduling patients to collecting final payments, requires tedious amounts of paperwork. Furthermore, a complex workflow facilitates costly underpayments, denials, and ignored claims and can lead to administrative duties transferring onto physicians.
And of course, the manual work of practice administration not only makes practices less efficient, but it adds to the greater likelihood of costly and time-wasting mistakes.
This is why efficient medical practices use software to automate most of their workflow. Practice management systems are programmed to handle all kinds of different occurrences, such as patient scheduling, expired due dates and upcoming deadlines.
Perhaps most importantly, PM software ensures valuable information is delivered to the right people, which also results in properly assigned tasks that can be more easily monitored by management.
As a private practice physician, your main focus should be on treating patients, not worrying about getting paid. It’s important to implement software that allows staff to handle the menial tasks, thereby freeing you to become a better doctor.
Can Practices Integrate Health IT Software Into Administrative Workflows?
An EHR that integrates with a high-performing practice management solution facilitates the process between the clinical and financial aspects of patient care.
There are three key benefits stemming from tight PM/EHR integration. First, practices can streamline patient management from appointment scheduling to payment processing, allowing technology to remove simple – but time-consuming – administrative tasks from the shoulders of physicians and staff alike.
Second, integration simplifies the collection process. Every patient who comes through the door is processed by both the EHR and the practice management system’s billing application, making charge entry and coding seamless, minimizing under-coding, and maximizing first-pass resolution rates.
Finally, by selecting a particular vendor who can deliver strong EHR and PM capabilities, medical practices minimize the need for expensive third-party interfaces, resulting in a consistent experience across the practice and lowering long-term support costs.
According to the PPI, only 9% of physicians describe their current staff, technology, and processes as “very effective,” thus leaving much to be desired in the areas of practice efficiency.
Hopefully, as technology progresses and more practices adopt more efficient health care IT solutions, physicians will worry less about remedial tasks and more about treating patients. Who wouldn’t want that?
