Our time is being wasted
Our time is increasing being wasted by physicians. Every few months, there are additional demands on our time that do nothing to improve our productivity, our patient care, patient satisfaction, or our financial gain.
Compliance training for hospitals: how many active shooter, hand-washing, antibiotic compliance, OSHA and HIPAA videos have you done? Every year, for every organization, hospital, clinic you belong to?
Maintenance of Certification: Yes, reading the articles is a good thing. But answering the questions? No.
Continuing Medical Education: The forms are all the same, and offer no actual proof you learned anything. Can we just not?
Computer updates. Enough said.
Email: Ditto
Data migration, and the classes to learn how to do data migration
Patient portal messages: No, I can’t answer your billing question or your scheduling issue. No, the 0.1% drop in your hematocrit is not clinically significant. No, I don’t have time to do a peer to peer for a service that has never been covered by your insurance for any reason. No, I cannot give you FMLA for an extra 2 days because you hate your job.
Signing orders. Computer, I wrote the orders. They are signed. I don’t need to re-sign them.
Multifactor authorization: can we devise a computer the recognizes us and just boots up? I thought this was already a thing. Fingerprints? Face? C’mon.
Compliance webinars. Just make it easier to comply in the first place. Water seeks the easiest path.
Updating state licensing. And multi-state licensing. Why? Why can’t we just be licensed physicians and call it good?
Submitting FSA expenses. Submitting bills to insurance. Submitting work travel expenses.
Patient no shows. If they didn’t confirm, cancel them!
A lot of this can’t be fixed by us. But some of it can. Here’s how.
Close your computer at the end of the day and do not reopen it. Don’t just check a few messages after the kids go to bed. You cannot make tomorrow better by working harder today. 10 minutes before you want to end your day, or the the last 10 minutes (no more than this) check your messages and tasks and select the most important ones to do. Pick the ones that shouldn’t wait. The patient who needs reassurance. The time-sensitive matter. Tomorrow, dive into those messages and tasks and group them by type. Sometimes I have the energy for a long email. But usually, if I can’t answer quickly, they need a consult, not for you to write a free book.
Decided what time your day ends and stick to it.
Nickel and dime your time. Can you end 10 minutes earlier? That adds up to an hour a week of time you have reclaimed. Can you shorten your commute? Can you work from home more days, leave the office midday and work from home the rest of the day to avoid rush hour traffic? Can you Uber once or twice a week and use that time to do tasks, take meetings, or make calls?
If you have the flexibility, can you book an admin day for yourself, one day month? Life-changing. If your manager won’t agree to this, you can take a sick day and book an early morning doctor appointment. The rest of the day is yours. 1 day a month adds up to two weeks of additional vacation time. And no, it isn’t wage theft. I actually do work on my admin days. I simply don’t see patients. But I also have that flexible schedule that gives your brain such a nice break.
Rethink the idea of wage theft. Accusing a doctor of wage theft for controlling their schedule is laughable. If you really wanted to consider this, hospitals and large practices rely on your time theft regularly. They expect you to take call, work nights and weekends without pay, work when you are injured or sick, call in from vacation. And we do. I have done that, many times. I don’t refuse to do this, illness is inconvenient and unpredictable and a certain amount of this goes with the job. But don’t feel guilty at all if you take a little of your time back.
Train your team. My two biggest tools? Delegation and standing orders. These go hand in hand. Nurses (or AI, or another team member) can be trained to review labs and make decisions based on your standing orders. My orders review went from hundreds of labs a day to 3 a week.
Three magic words. The three magic words as team leader are, “My expectation is…” and then state your expectation. For example, we have a daily decisions meeting about our IVF patients. We also have a monthly meeting about our upcoming cycles. These meetings were long, drawn out, poorly prepared and boring. I told them that my expectation was the charts were all reviewed prior to the meeting and the results were on the chart and on the list so we could review them quickly. If the labs were pending, they were to make a note of that so we wouldn’t spend time looking. The daily meeting went from 30 minutes to 10 minutes. That’s 20 extra minutes for every team member daily to get patients their instructions and get home on time. Your time management skills benefit your team too.