What is charting long hours costing you?

Charting is the pain point of many physicians. Many are seeing patients eight hours a day while using an additional three to four hours to complete the patient documentation. With the quality measures and particular requirements of each electronic medical records, working an extra three to four hours is a common occurrence.

Spending extra hours charting after seeing your last patient is costing you time. We all have time. Twenty-four hours a day. The time you spend on patient documentation is the time you will not get back. That is the time you could have done something else if you spend less time on charting. Time is ticking away. Many physicians think that they are more like charting machines than clinicians.

Most physicians are employed. Some are in private practice. In either situation, it is rare to have extra pay for overtime work. This means that for every extra hour you spend on charting, you are doing it for free. In fact, you are giving away money. Let us do some simple math here. Imagine you are an employed physician and your hourly rate is $200 per hour. You are paid to work eight hours a day, five days a week. You spend an extra four hours to do your chart, and probably some orders and phone calls. That translates to $800 a day you are not paid for, $4000 a week, and $16,000 in a month (using 4 weeks as a month). You are doing this the whole year, $16,000 x 10 months is $160,000. (I use ten months out of the year for easy math, and to take into account of vacations, conferences, etc.). That is an astonishing amount of money that you are giving away. Even if you only work an extra two hours a day, that still translates to $80,000 a year!

Not to mention that, what if you use two of those hours a day to see patients. In private practice, you earn money by seeing patients. Many employed positions use the RVU incentive model. The more patients you see, the more revenue you get. By using that time to do your charts, you are not doing any revenue generating activity and you are working for free.

The mental toll on physicians working hours they are not scheduled for is astounding. I experienced this firsthand as I used to spend an extra three to four hours a day to finish my charts and other in-basket tasks. Most of those extra hours were spent on patient documentation. I was dreading before going to work. I felt frustrated, annoyed and hopeless before having the capability of improving my efficiency. What patient would prefer to see a doctor who is stressed, overwhelmed and too exhausted to connect? Not to mention that such a physician is at an increased risk of producing errors. There is the sense of guilt from the inability to be fully present with the patients. The mental exhaustion and energy drainage is real.

Charting for long hours also cost you your life outside of work. There is less time for yourself and for your family. Do you even have time to do something you enjoy during the week? Or are you just going through the motions every day, lacking joy and fulfillment?

Charting extra hours is expensive in every way. The solution to gaining back time, money, sanity, physical health and non-clinical time is to increase your charting efficiency. That is exactly what I did. I am still seeing, on average, over twenty patients a day. Just take the other Tuesday as an example. My office hours are from 8 am to 4 pm. I saw twenty-three patients, including one new patient. I finished my charts, including phone calls and in-basket tasks by 4:15 pm. I chatted a little with my colleague and left the office at 4:30 pm. Leaving work at a decent hour without the burden of more work at home frees up your time, preserves your physical and emotional well-being. That is why I am coaching other physicians to do the same, to increase their charting efficiency so that they can gain back time and rediscover the joy in life and in patient care.