Returning Time to Clinicians Is Why Innovation Matters

If you were given 25,920 minutes or 432 hours or 18 days’ worth of time back in the last year, what would you do with it?

While you think about your answer, here’s a quick story a friend recently shared with me. As she checked in for her annual physical at her primary care physician’s office, she noticed a whiteboard on the wall behind the receptionist.

It listed the practice’s eight providers with a number next to each name. This number represented the minutes that each provider was running behind schedule for that day. Nearly all of them were in the double-digits – and it was only noon.

Talk about demoralizing. It’s no wonder that providers continue to face high rates of burnout while patient trust in their doctors continues to erode dramatically.

The worst part? According to a recent study on avoidable mortality, “despite spending more than any country in the world on health care, life expectancy in the US is comparably worse than that of most other high-income countries.” According to the study, avoidable mortality relates to the number of deaths each year in people younger than 75 years that could have been prevented or avoided through timely and effective health care and prevention.

Note the key phrase here: timely and effective health care.

Back to my initial question: have you figured out what you would do with 18 days of time returned to you? And, by the way, the time you’re getting back comes from a task that needs to be done. It is largely a manual process and no one really enjoys doing it.

Think of what it would be like to only spend about 30 seconds doing the dishes every night, between unloading and re-loading the dishwasher and cleaning up the kitchen, instead of the 10-15 minutes it likely takes you now. And the best part is, the time you save is entirely yours.

There are parts of healthcare that are just like doing the dishes – we might consider prior authorizations as one of those time-consuming, manual, yet necessary parts of how care is delivered.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We have the technology, interoperability at scale and innovators ready to tackle even the most complex challenges facing healthcare today.

Until now, the missing piece to solving the crushing administrative process that stands between care providers, patients and the care they deserve, has been the cross-industry collaboration, which is arguably just as important as adding the dish soap and pressing start on the dishwasher.

Collaboration between health plans and care managers, physicians, pharmacists and care providers is key not only for diagnosing the problems within healthcare, but ultimately, for developing technologies that can provide comprehensive solutions and impactful results, especially for patients. This same collaboration has spurred the development of innovative technologies that automate the previously manual workflows required for prior authorizations. 

Not only have these solutions been shown to enhance efficiency, financial performance and job satisfaction for prescribers, but they have substantially reduced the average time to approval for medications patients need. And by leveraging real-time data from within patients’ electronic health records, these solutions have also reduced prior authorization denials and appeals resulting from a lack of information.

Simplifying these labor-intensive and iterative processes through automation enables providers to spend more time on direct patient care instead of hunting through charts and sitting on hold with insurance companies. More importantly, it can be life-changing for patients whose physicians reported high rates of abandoned treatment and delays in access to necessary care due to prior authorization challenges. 

In addition to improving access and quality of care, while reducing administrative burden and feelings of burnout, early implementation of these technology solutions in a relatively limited capacity, has already demonstrated the potential to save care team members enormous amounts of precious time by automating a set of tasks that are required as part of care delivery.

So, what would you do with that time?

For the doctors with ‘minutes behind schedule’ next to their name for all the world to see, it’s not hard to imagine how they would spend the extra time. I bet they would say, “talking to my patients for a few minutes longer,” or “going to my son’s soccer game on a weeknight.”

I think we can trust that for these clinicians and care providers across the healthcare ecosystem, there’s no doubt that any time returned to them would be time well spent.

Photo: malerapaso, Getty Images

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