Published: 2009-06-17 14:41:39
Author: Joanne Kenen | New America Foundation | May 15, 2009
You know all those bad jokes about how doctors are always on the golf course. Wrong sport. Turns out they are jumping through hoops—$31 billion worth of hoops.
Two new studies released this week online by Health Affairs examine how health care providers, particularly physician practices, interact with insurers. One studyfound that doctors personally spend the equivalent of three full weeks a year on billing and related insurance information. The overall cost to their practices (their time as well as other medical and clerical personnel) was about $31 billion a year (in 2006)—which as study author Larry Casalino noted, was about six times what we spent at the time on the State Children's Health Insurance Program and nearly 7 percent of total national expenses on physician and clinical services. Primary care practices spent more time on these administrative tasks than specialists. Very little of the data—only about two hours a year for the doctor—pertained to quality data.
The second study looked at the billing and insurance-related activities at one large multi-site, multi-specialty California group practice. The cost (in physician and clerical time) turned out to be $85,276 per physician, or 10 percent of operating revenue. (And that excluded the time the doctors spent recording procedure and diagnosis codes). And this California practice isn't bogged down in paper; they already use electronic medical records for both clinical and billing data. (Some older studies, before medicine began its slow and not always so steady migration to Health IT, showed even more time and money spent on administration in the days of pure paper.)