Many doctors feel burned out. That’s because they spend too much time documenting care in order to comply with different quality reporting requirements.
But healthcare leaders can help, according to Peter Ubel, M.D., a physician and professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, in a commentary for KevinMD.com on MedPage Today.
He says they can help eliminate physician burnout by working with payers to cut the number of quality measures that clinicians track, developing some level of uniformity across payers on the measures being tracked, fully leveraging the electronic health record to automate more tasks, and striking a better balance between time spent tracking measures and time spent with patients.
“These bureaucratic hassles are extraordinary and need to be fixed,” writes Ubel. While he supports the use of quality measures to reimburse physicians, he says it’s the burden of tracking so many quality measures that’s overwhelming doctors and could spell the end of their careers.