By Jesse Wood

Health care’s paperwork problem is becoming a burden, and for a number of reasons.

Those outside of the health care industry might think that doctors and nurses spend their entire day in face-to-face interactions with patients.



However, a large portion of their day is actually spent dealing with that same problem that plagues other companies – paperwork. This means that patients get less time with their doctors, and doctors are able to see fewer patients.

Here are just a few of the statistics surrounding paperwork in the health care industry and how it can affect patient care.

How much time?
On average, a doctor in the United States will spend 16.6% of his or her time on non-patient-related paperwork. That adds up to about 9 hours per week, and it doesn’t even include things like patient charts and medical records – that just refers to things like insurance claims and other such administrative documents.

This is among the reasons EMRs and EHRs are becoming a huge burden in the health care industry: although they culminate in a digital environment, the clunkiness and lack of usability they impose on health care practitioners is cause for concern.

Health care’s paperwork problem is one of the main reasons bureaucratization has seeped into the well-intentioned aspects of the world’s most noble industry.

What does this translate to in dollars? In 2014, the estimated cost of physician time spent on administrative paperwork was an astonishing $102 billion!

Doctors in certain specialties may spend more or less time on paperwork. The top 4 specialties that spend the most time on paperwork are as follows:

• Psychiatrists—20.3%
• Internists—17.3%
• General practitioners—17.3%
• Pediatricians—14.1%

However, hospital administrators have discovered this issue, and many are incentivizing use of document management systems. For example, human resources professional, Dr. Chris Beebe, is a DMS user and recently received AIIM’s World Paper-Free Day Paper-Free Hero designation.

Let’s break that down another way, based on the kind of care that the patient is receiving. If you were to go to the ER and your treatment took an hour, the hospital staff would have to spend another full hour doing the paperwork for your visit. Health care’s paperwork problem is not these practitioners’ fault so much as it is a byproduct of hospital administration bureaucracy.

For every hour of surgery or inpatient care you receive, physicians spend 36 minutes on paperwork. Skilled nursing care requires 30 minutes of paperwork for every hour of care given to a patient. Not even home health care is exempt. For every hour of medical care you receive in your home, there are 48 minutes of paperwork to do.

More Industry Headlines