The average American uses 700 pounds of paper per year – a startling fact for anyone who has ever attempted to lift such a hefty load. For doctors who literally live and die by the sheet and ream, they often feel as if they’re actually carrying the weight of that paperwork on their shoulders. [...]
Does it feel like you are – quite literally – buried under mountains of paperwork these days? You’re not alone: Despite the “epic” (with a small AND capital e) evolution of electronic medical records, you’re still eyeball-deep in the kinds of administrative and menial tasks that keep you from pursuing your passion – healing [...]
Old habits are hard to break – which is why it’s amazing to behold how much abuse we’ll sign on for in the interest of keeping the status quo. Though one could argue that the very adoption of the iDevice – the one in your hand right now, likely – represents the embrace of [...]
When it comes to habits, scientists have found something alarming: It can take up to nine months to break an old habit. Though it can be far less for recently acquired habits, for those proclivities that have been ingrained to the point that they’re part of our muscle memory, it can be an arduous [...]
Your productivity is under assault – mountains of paperwork are raining down on your practice, creating a barrier that’s standing between you and your passion for patient care. And there, atop the blockade, is the ultimate insult – inpatient census management, which stretches out like barbed wire. This continuing battle to manage your hospital-bound [...]
The ticking of the clock can represent both an opportunity and a struggle for today’s practicing physicians. The romantic view of a doctor’s role as a healer has been replaced with a much harsher reality: Mountains of paperwork, hours of data entry, and a struggle to reconcile the need to see patients with the [...]
Inpatient medicine is unique. Unlike the singular relationship between patient and provider in the office, hospitalized patients are often cared for by a team of doctors and APPs, sometimes changing on a daily basis. How are these providers to relay information to each other? With each day there is another chapter of a patient’s [...]
You work hard as a medical provider taking care of patients. There are the countless hours interacting with nurses and families. Then comes the documentation, which seems to get more demanding with each passing year. To not receive compensation for your work is not an option. Yet somehow we have processes in place that [...]
The process of rounding at the hospital has been paper-based since the beginning of time. Providers print a list of patients, fold it neatly into their pocket, and proceed to venture from floor to floor of each hospital they cover. Along the way they diligently collect paper facesheets containing patient demographics and insurance information, [...]
Old habits are hard to break. Whether it be something as serious as quitting smoking, something less serious like biting our nails, or something seemingly easy like cutting down on junk food, habits are ingrained in the way we live our lives, so breaking them – stopping them altogether, or adjusting the way we [...]
