How To Achieve Efficient Charting With More Fun

Many physicians I coached enjoy direct patient interaction and care. They do not like the patient documentation part because it takes up most of their time. Charting results in less face-to-face time with patients, and less time spared to do other things. Simply put, charting sucks up their life, physically and mentally.

That was me not too long ago. Seeing twenty-some patients with hematology or oncology issues cost me an extra 4 or more hours to finish their charts, phone calls and other paperwork. That was miserable. I grew to dislike charting. Charting was the biggest obstacle between having a life and being a slave to the electronic medical record program.

How did I gain back 2-3 hours of my time back every day while seeing the same number of patients and using the same EMR? I still do not enjoy charting, yet I do not hate it. It is worth it to take the time to remind yourself the purpose of charting. Yes, it is to justify the billing of your services. More importantly, it serves as a tool to record and communicate with other clinicians your findings, assessment and plan for the patient. Charting is an essential part of patient care, whether you like it or not. Since this is something we cannot change, we can change the way we view charting. This will help us change the way we do charting.

Most physicians do not like charting. You do not have a like it to do it. Sure, enjoying something makes it easier to do. It is also possible to go from disliking charting to being neutral about it.

What if you can make charting more fun? Some of you are probably skeptical about this. To many of you, charting is a mundane yet necessary part of patient care. It is probably the furthest thing from being fun. It is all about your perspective. As long as you are seeing patients, their charts will have to be completed somehow. As charting is an obstacle to you having a life, completing them sooner will allow you to leave work and do things outside of medicine. In other words, charting is a means to living life outside of patient care.

You are likely to do a task faster and more efficiently when you do not hate doing it. You do not have to go to the other extreme of loving to do charting. Even from hating to being neutral about it helps. You can make charting become a more bearable experience by gamifying it. Playing a game is much more interesting than merely doing a mandatory task. Playing a game requires some creativity and flexibility of the mind.

For charting, set a goal. For example, if you usually go home around 7:30 pm while your last patient is scheduled at 4 pm, make it a game of challenge – is it possible to go home by 7 pm with the work done? Setting a goal helps you stay focused. It helps you prioritize what to do. Another game you can play is to see how long you can sustain without checking your cell phone or email messages – until your scheduled time. This minimizes your distractions and you can stay focused better.

The fun thing is that you get to make as many games as you wish during your work hours. The other part of the game that is essential is celebration. Celebrate when you achieve any goal. Celebrate when you are that much closer to your goal. Celebrate when you have decreased the times of checking on social media by half. You may even go a step further by giving yourself a reward.

If you have a colleague who also has difficulty in charting efficiency, form a team. Keep each other accountable. Encourage each other. Set a common goal and just do it. This is not a competition between the two of you. It is a collaborative effort to achieve the common goal – to make charting more fun and more efficient.

Most things in life can be gamified. As I have experienced many life and death situations in my career, I see that many medical diagnoses are serious, and we can approach those serious situations in a more light-hearted way. Patient documentation is a serious task. You want to do your best to record the essential and accurate information. By making the charting process more fun, you are going to feel lighter. You will think that charting is more tolerable and doable. You will be more efficient.