As a CPA, I was told by my doctor that I was a very respectful and one of the best patients he had because of the following:
- I never went to my doctor trying to squeeze a dozen complaints in one single appointment and expected him to take care of them all in 15-20 minutes.
- I never called my doctor in the middle of the night or on weekends to complain about my medical conditions and demand him to phone in a prescription for me without even seeing me.
- I never gave my doctor a no-show on my appointment and I am always polite and respectful of him during the short 15-20 minutes section he sees me in the exam room.
- I always pay my doctor's bill on time and he is always on top of my Christmas Gift list.
As a CPA, I have clients who are physicians and medical practices. I provide them with accounting, tax planning and advisory services and I help them keep track and manage their finances. Because of this, I know how medical practices operate. I know how they bill to make money and where they spend the money they received from Medicare and insurance companies. Such knowledge had made me realize that many doctors work really hard and yet they aren't getting paid for what their years of training, education and hard work deserve. Specialists and Surgeons are in better position even though they also experience huge stress and litigation risks. Primary care medicine that serves the majority of people like myself, is not a good profession to be in. If I have children, I will tell them not to go to medical school if they want to practice primary care medicine. I will not pay for medical schools if their goal is to become an internist or primary care physician. They just don't make much money at all. I have hair stylists clients who make more than these doctors on an hourly basis.
In America, the public expects that healthcare to be free, and they complain more about their $10 copay for a doctor's visit than their coffee break at Starbucks. They expect doctors to work free at nights and weekends to listen to their complaints and phone in medicines for them. Meanwhile, these same people don't expect to go to see a movie for free. They don't expect to talk to their lawyers for free either.
When a doctor spends time at night and weekend taking phone calls from patients doing re-fills, he doesn't make a dime because health insurance and Medicare don't pay for service like this. The doctor who does this can't bill it.
If you think your primary care doctors are making a lot of money because you pay your insurance premium. It's not true. There are lots of restrictions to restrict a doctor on how much to bill for what. As their accountant, I feel sorry for the primary care doctors because most of them can only occasionally bill $200 top for a visit. The average 20 minute visit time with patient creates an extra 2-3 hours of paperwork and documentation, thanks to EPIC EMR. When a doctor bills $200, he has to pay himself the salary, office rent, medical assistants' salary, malpractice insurance and other bills to run a medical practice. As an accountant and tax payer and patient, it makes me sick to see how most of the money spent are not on taking care of the patients but on legal compliance and other regulatory mandated documentation garbage that is totally irrelevant to my health.
There are too many non-medical functions and incompetent people making money in between the doctors and the patients. As if dealing with these are not enough, the doctors are forced to use this really clumsy, cluttered and totally awkward electronic medical record called EPIC. As an accountant, I see doctors' productivity drops drastically with increase work hours by looking at the numbers since they implemented EPIC. As a patient, I was shown by my doctor how he uses EPIC to maintain my electronic record after my visit. I was shocked to actually see how time consuming it is for my doctor to update my chart, and to close it. And I am not a patient who has complicated issues. I am a healthy young professional who is only there for my checkup...
As an auditor and accountant, the way that doctors operate with EPIC is shockingly inefficient and ineffective to me. The only winners in this are really the company which makes the software and the non-medical people the company hires to promote, run, maintain and train doctors how to use this tedious counter-productive electronic medical record. There got to be a better EMR out there, is there?
If you are a doctor who hates EPIC, you are not alone, many of my physician clients hate them too. I hate it too because as a patient, I don't want my doctor to spend more time on working the EPIC charts than spending time with me. Click the link below to see how other doctors feel about EPIC:
So, if you are a physician currently using EPIC, and your practice's bottom line is negatively affected by it as a result of more unpaid hours, please feel free to drop me a comment and share your nightmare with me.
