ifroehlich

Are You Carrying an Unnecessary Burden?

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a study that closely followed a 5 provider practice for one year in attempts to determine what burdens a primary care physician faces during an average day at the office.
The results showed physicians engaging in a large amount of time consuming activities that were not directly related to patient care.
The average day of a primary care physician involved:

• Seeing 18.1 patients
• Handling 23.7 phone calls
• Answering 16.8 e-mails, mostly dealing with test result interpretations
• Reviewing 19.5 lab reports, 11.1 imaging reports and 13.9 consult reports
• Issuing 12.1 prescription refills

How can some of these burdens be eased?
E-Prescribing systems can effectively eliminate large amounts of incoming phone calls from pharmacies that are requesting clarification on an illegible prescription or to request a prescription renewal or refill.

“Before we implemented our e-prescribing system, it was maddening how much time we wasted trying to get through the pharmacy, faxing and refaxing every time we got a busy signal and being kept on hold.”  She goes on to state that adopting DrFirst’s Rcopia, “has been a huge time savings because we no longer have to field calls from the pharmacist to clarify these issues or have our staff members reach out to patients to explain why their refill requests can’t be automatically renewed.”
Debra Warrington, the office manager for Alan Warrington, MD, from her ‘peer perspective‘ case study.
There is no need for practices to experience such time wasting activities when there are systems like Rcopia available that can get the physician back to focusing on being a doctor first!