A recent article from Medical Economics Magazine underscores just how challenging things are for doctors and how the pressure is only building as we head into 2015.
I would like to take a moment to highlight and discuss some of the points made in this article.
Challenge 1: Administrative burdens
More and more paperwork is being required by insurance companies and the government. Doctors are spending inordinate amounts of time NOT seeing patients. The number of doctors who spend more than 8hrs per week (one full work day!) on paperwork jumped from 58% to 70% over a one year period.
“The physicians I know truly enjoy spending time with patients and teaching, and anything that takes them away from that is a negative,” says Henry Borkowski, MD.
Challenge 2: Independence vs. employment
We are seeing various trends as far as some doctors giving up their private practice and working for a hospital. They typically don’t WANT to do this, but feel they have no choice. A lot of doctors are going back to private practice because they can’t stand being an employee and some have been promised certain levels of income that end up changing without much notice from the hospital.
Some physicians are returning to private practice because their compensation from hospitals became less attractive after the expiration of their initial contract, says Divan Dave, chief executive officer of OmniMD.
Omni is helping three physicians, including Rajdeo, return to independent practice after being employed by hospital systems. “They got so upset at the hospital they are now converting their private practices back,” Dave says.“One of the doctors said, `I didn’t go to medical school to work for someone. I went to be independent.’ ”
Challenge 3: Payers dictating healthcare
The dreaded audit. Medicare has ramped up the auditing of doctors to make sure they are doing everything correctly and getting proper reimbursement. The penalties for errors, intentionally fraudulent or not, are very high. Huge penalties could be levied in some cases.
Luckily, our licensees have a great door opener for this issue. Our AuditGuard service will help a doctor with a sort of pre-audit to help make and adjustments and corrections to claims and workflow. That way, if they ever do get audited, the chances of fines are greatly reduced.
Read more about these and additional issues by going to the original article here:
Top 6 practice management challenges facing physicians in 2015