According to Forbes, “A recently published study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that for every hour physicians were seeing patients, they were spending nearly two additional hours on paperwork.”
Whoa.
Well, we knew traditional docs spent a lot of time on paperwork… but this much?! It gives whole new meaning to one of our favorite catchphrases in support of the Atlas.md EMR: You didn’t go to medical school to fill out paperwork! Let’s break some numbers down, though, because when you look under the surface you’ll find the answer to an even bigger problem.
This Time article from a few years ago indicates that 22% of a docs time is spent on charting, EMR, or insurance matters. That’s the equivalent of 165K full time physicians. One hundred sixty five thousand docs could be seeing patients if they weren’t pushing papers instead. It gets worse. New numbers blow that out of the water. Based on the new Forbes study, we’d have more than 500K full time physicians back and taking care of patients.
Here it is, plain and simple. We don’t have a doctor shortage issue. We have an efficiency issue.
You might be thinking, “man, paperwork sure is a necessary evil.” To which Direct Care would like to challenge you: what if it wasn’t necessary? Don’t be silly; we’re not advocating not charting. But what if you could get that time back by being more efficient with the paperwork you really do have to do? It’s what Direct Care providers across the country already know. They skip the insurance paperwork; patients pay them directly. If they use Atlas.md, they actually like their EMR because it’s intuitive to their workflow and leaves out all the flashing lights and other distractions. Taking it one step further, their phone, email, text and even video call correspondence is automatically logged right in the patient’s chart without them ever having to lift a pen. Nice.
So, when we work more efficiently, we eliminate the time-consuming wasteland of paperwork that used to eat up half our day (literally!) and we find ourselves exactly where we not only need to be, but want to be. With patients.
If you’re wondering where all the doctors have gone, check underneath that giant pile of papers. Then go dig them out, tell them about Direct Care and make their lives and the lives of their patients infinitely better.