Something to share with your print customers…are computers always more efficient than paper forms?

The following is from an unsolicited Facebook post by our friend and family member Dr. Steve Bachmeyer. It reflects the hidden cost that can be incurred in the name “efficiency”.

You’re left wondering, is paper all that inefficient if the alternative is wrestling with a bureaucratic, byzantine computer system?

“Today marks the 13th anniversary of my final day at Tecumseh Family Practice, in Tecumseh, Michigan. I had to leave because Medicare and Blue Cross mandated that we go to electronic medical records, and I had to go out of business. All of us did. I had a booming practice, with 6000 patients on my roster. My business partner had 6000 patients on his, and our PA had 4000 on his. It was a busy practice. I delivered babies, did surgeries, did in-office procedures, had a free clinic on Wednesday afternoons, did home visits and took care of people in the nursing homes. I also held clinic out in the fields for the migrant workers on Thursday night during the summer and I even worked a gig for a local MMA club, doing ringside boxing medicine several times a year. It was a lot of fun.
All of that stopped when I could not record visits any longer on paper. With the institution of mandated electronic medical records, the computers slowed me down in the office to 10 patients a day. Home visits and work in the field ended. At 10 patients a day, no one can cover their office overhead. When I left, I was $75,000 in debt and working 120 hours a week.
All of us physicians here in Lenawee County sold our practices. It was a survival move. Somehow, the Big Hospital Corporations can afford to support a physician that only sees 10 to 15 patients a day, so they bought all of us up. All but a couple of physicians here in the county became employed. Prior to that, 95% of us were independently practicing.
I left Family Medicine and became a Hospitalist and an ER doc for about 10 years, mostly working 2 hours away, especially in the last 5 years. Over the years, I learned to cope with multiple EMR platforms and I am pretty good at all of them.
When the VAMC in Ann Arbor opened a clinic here in Adrian, though, I leaped at the chance to come home. For the past 3-1/2 years, I’ve been privileged to work again in primary care at the VAMC clinic here 4 miles from my house. I still only see 10 to 14 patients a day here at the VA because, well, you know the reason.
I get paid a salary, though, regardless of how many people I see. And I am having the time of my life. I love this job. Working with vets is the best. I see patients face to face for probably 25 hours a week and the time flies by. The other 35 hours I spend at work are spent charting and wrestling with the computer. The limitation on my ability to see more patients is that computer. I could not manage to fit another person into the schedule with all the time that the computer demands of me.
I am not complaining about it, though. Working 60 hours a week is half the amount of time that I spent at work previously. I was at a funeral a couple of years ago and I found myself telling one of my cousins that I was semi retired. And I am. If you consider that I used to see more than 150 people a week in the office before I even went and did rounds at the hospital, or at the nursing home, or visited a patient’s house, caring for 50 or 60 people a week in a primary care clinic is 1/3 the job that I used to do.
Seriously, think about that.
We were so efficient when we used paper. We could make a real impact on people’s lives and only take 10 minutes to do it instead of half an hour. Scribble scribble file away.
Boom! NEXT!
We were able to take care of so, so, so many people.
They announced that we had “a national physician shortage“ in 2012 and put out all sorts of plans to bring more caregivers on board. Trained PAs and NPs and called for more physician residency slots to be filled. It was completely false. We have plenty of physicians.
But all of us are tied down to computers.
Such a waste.
Well, happy anniversary! Here’s to 13 years!”