The last two years have dealt doctors and nurses a brutal hand, leaving many ready to fold. The horror of so many lives lost, compounded with additional regulatory and administrative burdens in a sector that is already one of the most heavily regulated, has many in healthcare rethinking their life’s calling.
As CEO of myNurse, I have witnessed the latter firsthand. The administrative burden placed on doctors and care teams significantly impacts their ability to effectively and efficiently do their jobs and limits the number of patients they’re able to see and the time they have to spend with those they do. Those who enter the medical field do so with the noblest of ambitions, but these regulatory hoops force them to prioritize compliance and paperwork ahead of their patients.
The administrative obligations placed on health care providers are unsustainable and the often overreaching micro regulation carries an enormous financial cost. A recent study estimated that healthcare administration in the U.S. costs more than $800 billion, with approximately $265 billion of that being spent on unnecessary regulatory and administrative tasks. This is more than the U.S. spends annually on cancer-related and heart disease-related healthcare combined.
Beyond the wasted hours and additional staff needed to deal with these tasks and requirements like preauthorizations are patients suffering due to delayed treatments. That’s not to mention those who might have experienced different outcomes if a portion of those wasted billions had been redirected to research on the aforementioned leading causes of death.
It should be no surprise, then, that we are facing an urgent shortage of physicians and clinical staff—one that is likely to get far worse. A recent survey showed significant burnout amongst physicians and nurses in 2020, with one in five physicians and 40% of nurses planning to leave their practice in the next two years. Another revealed that over 90% of nurses are considering leaving their profession. While COVID most certainly had a negative impact on our healthcare providers, most attribute their burnout to bureaucratic and administrative tasks. There’s no doubt the forced choice of administrative duties over best patient care plays a key role as well.
The widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) was supposed to streamline our healthcare system, but it has actually had the opposite effect. Adopting and maintaining EHRs has been a major contributor to physicians’ administrative burdens, robbing patients of in-person time with their doctors and forcing other staff to work longer hours to meet the requirements. A recent survey found that 30% of physicians and other health professionals “spend more than six hours per week—almost a full workday per week—on the EHR outside of normal scheduled work time.”
Smarter technology is one impactful answer, allowing doctors and caregivers to meet administrative requirements while still focusing on direct patient care.
For example, there is growing evidence that EHR software that integrates voice recognition and artificial intelligence could lead to greater efficiencies for doctors and caregivers, returning more than three hoursto their work week. Some hospital systems are also in the process of implementing a speech-to-text solution that records physician-patient conversations and incorporates medical data directly into the patient’s EHR.
We also must continue to prioritize efforts to improve interoperability between EHR’s, a goal which so far remains elusive. Telehealth, a rapidly growing area that promises convenience and more widespread access to care, must also be streamlined and more widely adopted.
It’s time to reevaluate our dysfunctional healthcare system and to relieve doctors and caregivers from the growing, unsustainable mountain of paperwork and regulatory compliance measures. Healthcare organizations must deploy smarter technology to give their staff the time they need to focus on what they were trained to do - spend time directly caring for patients.
