That crap blocking your arteries may well be attributed to a waxing
"burnout" among physicians.
Some leading healthcare executives now say the way medicine is practiced
in the United States is to blame, fueled in part by growing clerical
demands that have doctors spending two hours on the computer for every
one hour they spend seeing patients....
[R]esearchers have shown that burnout erodes job performance, increases
medical errors and leads doctors to leave a profession they once loved....
Experts define burnout as a syndrome marked by emotional exhaustion,
cynicism and decreased effectiveness. Many burned out doctors cut back
their hours to cope, and a disturbing number commit suicide....
[P]rimary care physicians spend more than half of
their 11.4 hour workday performing data entry and other tasks, according
to a September AMA/University of Wisconsin study published in the
Annals of Family Medicine.
To manage, doctors often finish work at home in the evening, a part of the day known as “pajama time.”
Hmmm....
ReplyDeleteI see several doctors during the year, my Internist is the only one that doesn't do data entry, at all, and his staff does little. All his notes are on paper. My folder is very thick. I am skeptical (but then I usually am anyway.
I left one specialist who was so glued to her computer screen she never made eye contact. She became upset when I insisted she at me, not the screen.
I left another specialist because he claimed his records were all lost in some kind of computer crash. Since he had no file for me, even though he had been treating me for a few years, he treated me like a new patient and I had to remind him of what he did in the past. I thought he was incompetent and / or doing something illegal. So I left. I now wonder if burnt out had anything to do with this. As I said, I envisioned other scenarios. Still, as far as my health was concerned this was unacceptable. (Where were the backups, the paper printouts? the response was "Huh? I guess his lawyer said 'Admit no wrong doing.")
Funny thing is many jobs' paperwork have increased dramatically as well. The reasons are mixed. The unacceptable problems arises when management (government agencies and / or insurance companies) willfully turns a blind eye to the increased time and effort and expects the same or more work plus the paperwork for the same compensation.
As far as work goes, I just as soon have a video recording done and then let an AI distill the video into notes, than spend 30% of my time documenting my activities. Otherwise get me a secretary to record the notes and get the secretary a secretary to record the noting taking, etc.