It’s the beginning of the year and every doctors office you go to is handing you paperwork to be filled out, asking for your insurance card, updating records and so on. We’ve heard it all, “I just filled that out”, “nothing has changed”, “I’m just getting x y or z done”. We know, we hear you. You dislike paperwork, we dislike paperwork, so why does the paperwork never end?
Of greatest importance, to make sure we have an accurate and up to date information to help determine the best course of care for you. This information includes your medical history, medications, allergies, reasons for seeing the doctor and family history. We also need to make sure we are managing billing with insurance companies so claims get paid accurately. Insurance companies have deadlines for submission that we must meet, so it’s best we submit claims correctly the first time.
Fair enough right? But why so much more in recent years….
The Affordable Care Act, enacted in March 2010, which according to Medicaid.gov, refers to “two separate pieces of legislation — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (P.L. 111-148) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-152)”. To simplify these Acts, the Federal Government mandated that certain quality criteria had to be met by healthcare providers in order for them to be paid fully for providing services for patients on Medicare and Medicaid. Monetary incentives are offered to physicians to offset the costs of meeting government mandates. If providers choose not to participate, they may be fined, have reimbursement for services rendered reduced or be prohibited altogether from seeing Medicare and Medicaid patients. Regardless of whether you have Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance the law applies to ALL unique patients. The first requirement is the purchase of an Electronic Medical Records and Patient Portal System for the healthcare practice. To ensure these EMRs are being utilized to improve patient care, the government instituted a Meaningful Use Program comprised of 13 Core Measures for which ALL healthcare practices must collect information.
In a recent study led by Christine Sinsky, MD, at the American Medical Association, “the study found physicians spent 27% of their time in their offices seeing patients and 49.2% of their time doing paperwork, which includes using the electric health record (EHR) system. Even when the doctors were in the examination room with patients, they were spending only 52.9% of the time talking to or examining the patients and 37.0% doing...you guessed it... paperwork. Moreover, the doctors who completed the after-hours diaries indicated that they were spending one to two hours each night doing -- drum roll please -- paperwork (or the EHR)”.
So, in summary, we get it, hang in there!
