Hate staying late? Do scut work throughout the day

Practice Management. By Mike Norbut, AMNews staff. June 28, 2004.

You scramble through a harried morning of patient visits, skip lunch because you're behind schedule and run through your afternoon appointments with only a few minutes to pause for important phone calls or staff questions.

You see your last patient out the door at 5 p.m., and you sit down -- to what? About three hours of paperwork, dictation and phone calls. Then you leave behind an hour's worth of work for staff to do in the morning, which puts you behind the next day, starting the vicious cycle all over again.

Sound familiar? It doesn't have to be that way, consultants say. By pulling your work in throughout the day, you can avoid late starts and even later evenings, and increase office productivity and efficiency.

It requires a change in philosophy more than anything, said Elizabeth Woodcock, principal of Woodcock & Associates, a consulting firm in Atlanta, and author of Mastering Patient Flow: More Ideas to Increase Efficiency and Earnings, published by the Medical Group Management Assn.

Doctors have a tendency to feel as if they're losing productive time if they're not in the exam room, Woodcock said. Meanwhile, they have started to get so busy after a couple of years in practice that they start to batch their paperwork -- essentially organizing it to do later. Bins are color-coded to signify different priorities, phone messages are placed in order of importance and charts are piled up for one long dictation session.

Staff members, of course, follow the physician's lead, setting up their own batching systems and putting off work that can't be done until the doctor has looked at it.