One of the most frequent complaints from practicing physicians is the erosion over the past 20 years of time spent with patients. Direct patient care now only accounts for 30% of total provider time. So, what’s the other 70%? Charting and clerical work. And for the doctors rounding at multiple facilities, throw in driving time as one of the non-clinical tasks. Some of these are unavoidable, but for the most part, doctors spend a fraction of their time being doctors. Every year this seems to get worse. With every new process, software platform, or regulatory requirement, the providers brace themselves for yet another burden.
Hospital rounding is a resource-heavy, mainly broken process, which eats away at provider time like nothing else. The more hospitals you add, the more complex it gets. Pile on more providers, and the mess gets bigger. The result is a massive time suck for everyone.
Protecting the Doctors
How do we assure that the process requirements for rounding do not become so burdensome, that efficiency is severely impacted? As the title of this blog states, Provider Time Is Precious. One challenge is that hospital rounding has many moving parts. Clinicians participate in rounds at different times of day, depending on their schedules, and every day is different. This unpredictability is compounded by the fact that the hospital census can shrink and swell by the hour. New patients being added to the list need to be conveyed to those covering. Patients being discharged need to be removed from the list so that no one wastes even more time hunting down a patient who has already departed.
Office Staff Are Burdened Too
By default, the office staff take on a lot of the responsibility to keep rounds moving. Calls from the hospital tend to filter back to the schedulers or front office staff, who in turn need to figure out who is covering at that particular moment, and then communicate with them. Practices can eat up precious FTEs managing this task. Provider communication accounts for a lot of wasted time as well. Practices that take the “fly by the seat of our pants” approach tend to spend enormous amounts of time texting and calling each other throughout the day:
“Who’s going to see the new one in the ICU?”
“There’s a new one in the ED if someone can see them.”
“Where did the patient on telemetry go?”
Those of you who round probably nodded your head at the familiarity of these quotes. There are hundreds more. Painful and inefficient.
Are You Seriously Saying Software Will Fix This?
Yes indeed. Workflow and charge capture software, when used wisely, can clean up these processes and eliminate much of the chaos. Keeping a centralized list, maintained in real-time, removes much of the problem. If your software allows for easy and fast charge capture, then it can be done at the point-of-care. This creates the visibility needed regarding which patients have been seen, and which ones have not. Better solutions allow assignment of providers to patients, and have built-in secure messaging so that communication is HIPAA compliant and incorporated into the overall workflow. This immediate efficiency, sometimes referred to as “census management” is one of the added benefits of charge capture for hospital rounding. Not to mention the fact that charges are now flowing electronically into your billing system, instead of carrying around cards or sheets, and relying on manual data entry to get a claim out.
Adopting smart solutions like workflow management and charge capture can maximize provider efficiency by streamlining an inherently arduous process, refocusing time and energy on direct patient care.
Smarter Rounding and Workflow Software for Doctors
At HybridChart, we provide technology that connects your healthcare team, increases efficiencies, AND improves your bottom line. HybridChart’s cloud-based software adapts to your practice’s unique workflow and will improve your profitability and patient outcomes by utilizing our 5 features: charge capture, census management, secure messaging, discharge planning, and data analytics.
NEVER miss another charge and get PAID for the work you do!
If you are interested in taking your medical practice to the next level and want to employ the best hospital charge capture practice available in the industry, come visit our website at www.hybridchart.com, call us at 1-877-977-5544, or click here to schedule a demo today!
- More About Dr. Sanders
Dr. Gregory Sanders is a Harvard-trained, practicing cardiologist and founder and CEO of HybridChart. He has been coding since the 1980s and has spent his medical career focusing on improving processes. His patient care skills earned him recognition as one of Phoenix Magazine’s TOP DOCs. He lives in Scottsdale with his family.