A friend who is a recently new medical Dr. also told me about an unintended (well—lobbyist intended) consequence of Obamacare (USA specific ofc). Basically the bill included a clause requiring providers to use electronic healthcare records. This was supposed to be partially so that the hospitals could coordinate patient information better but that bit didn’t work because everyone implemented their own system and the systems largely don’t talk to eachother. But who now gets a tidy copy of all the patients’ charts? Their insurance companies ofc! Insurance companies are using the more detailed info to reject reimbursements if the chart doesn’t include extremely specific language the insurance company can say “that wasn’t documented to standards” and just not pay for it. If providers (doctors as well as hospitals) want reimbursements they have to keep up with all this language specified by the insurance companies and make sure they train everyone on the updates about once every six months. Obviously this puts more strain in smaller systems (and economically disadvantaged ones) that don’t have the money to basically hire lawyers to keep up with the documentation required in order to receive reimbursement. It’s absurd to me our doctors are having to put so much time into paperwork (and apparently having to wait 15 seconds between every click in the EHR databases but that’s almost a separate issue).
A friend who is a recently new medical Dr. also told me about an unintended (well—lobbyist intended) consequence of Obamacare (USA specific ofc). Basically the bill included a clause requiring providers to use electronic healthcare records. This was supposed to be partially so that the hospitals could coordinate patient information better but that bit didn’t work because everyone implemented their own system and the systems largely don’t talk to eachother. But who now gets a tidy copy of all the patients’ charts? Their insurance companies ofc! Insurance companies are using the more detailed info to reject reimbursements if the chart doesn’t include extremely specific language the insurance company can say “that wasn’t documented to standards” and just not pay for it. If providers (doctors as well as hospitals) want reimbursements they have to keep up with all this language specified by the insurance companies and make sure they train everyone on the updates about once every six months. Obviously this puts more strain in smaller systems (and economically disadvantaged ones) that don’t have the money to basically hire lawyers to keep up with the documentation required in order to receive reimbursement. It’s absurd to me our doctors are having to put so much time into paperwork (and apparently having to wait 15 seconds between every click in the EHR databases but that’s almost a separate issue).
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