Doctors Hate their Computers: Here’s Why

Digitization is making it easier to provide better care, but is technology coming between patients and doctors? Is it changing the role of the doctor, and making healthcare better for patients and worse for practitioners?

These are the question posed by a recent feature article in The New Yorker by Dr. Atul Gawande, a general and endocrine surgeon at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

A Brave New World

In the past decade, over ninety percent of American hospitals have been computerized. Over half of Americans now have their health information in the Epic system.

The purpose of systems like Epic is to make the nitty gritty of healthcare more seamless, greener and more efficient.

They provide one system for nearly everything a doctor is likely to do: recording and communicating observations, sending prescriptions, ordering scans and tests and viewing the results, scheduling surgery, sending insurance bills, and more.

But doctors’ experience with these systems isn’t what it’s chalked up to be.

In Dr. Atul Gawande’s words: “I’ve come to feel that a system that promised to increase my mastery over my work has, instead, increased my work’s mastery over me.”

A study conducted in 2016 found that physicians now spend two hours of computer work for every hour spent speaking with a patient face to face. Even in exam rooms, half of physicians’ time is now spent facing the screen, doing data entry, which spills over after hours.

The average workday for a family physician at the University of Wisconsin is eleven and a half hours.

It’s taking a toll.

Physician burnout rates have now reached epidemic proportions. Forty percent of doctors screened tested positive for depression — double the rate of the general working population.

Rates of burnout vary by specialty, but, interestingly, the Mayo Clinic found that the strongest predictors of burnout were how much time the individual spent tied up doing computer documentation.

That’s why surgical professionals like neurosurgeons had especially poor work-life balance ratings and yet lower than average rates of burnout.

Read the full article

To learn more about how computerization is altering the medical field, and to hear some optimistic takes on how this brave new world could come to benefit both patients and practitioners, be sure to read the entire article by Dr. Atul Gawande here.

Customized Charge Cycle Solutions

MedCom’s consulting process and Chargemaster software solutions have saved hundreds of millions of dollars for healthcare organizations for the last 30 years.

Proven to reduce denials, enhance revenues and sustain results, MedCom specializes in OR Charge Optimization and 835 Payment & Denial Trending Analytics in addition to a variety of CDM Management and Charge Capture Services.

To learn more or to get started, visit our homepage or contact us today!