I’m being sarcastic, of course, but that’s often how it seems some days. Those are days when I’ve been busy at patients’ bedsides all day and then struggle to get my documentation done later, typically many hours later. I jot notes to myself as I go along, but it can be hard to recall at 5 p.m. just what I did and why at 8 a.m.
It used to be very much the other way, and that wasn’t always a good thing either. Years ago, I spent months going through patient charts from the era of 1920 to 1950. They were all paper, of course, and the hospital charts were remarkably thin, even for complicated patients. I recall one chart in particular. It was for a young child who was clearly deathly ill. The physician progress notes for her already prolonged stay in the hospital consisted of maybe two sheets of paper. Most of the daily notes were a single line. I could tell from the graphs of the child’s vital signs — temperature, pulse, breathing rates, and blood pressure — that one night, in particular, was nearly fatal. The note the next morning was written by a very famous and distinguished physician. I knew him in his retirement, and he was a very loquacious man in person. His note after the child’s bad night was this: “mustard plaster did not work.” If I were caring for a patient like that today, there would be just for that day and night multiple entries probably totally several pages on the computer screen.
Patient charts are burdened with several purposes that don’t always work together. The modern medical record as we know it, was invented by Dr. Henry Plummer of the Mayo Clinic in the first decade of the twentieth century. Up until that time each physician kept his (only rarely her) case notes really as notes to themselves. When the multi-specialty group appeared, and Mayo was among the first, the notion of each physician have separate records for the same patient made no sense; it was far more logical to have a single record that traveled from physician to physician with the patient. That concept meant the medical record now was a means for one physician to communicate with another. So progress notes were sort of letters to your colleagues. You needed to explain what you were thinking and why. Even today’s electronic medical records are intended to do this, although they do it less and less well.
Now, however, the record is also the principal way physicians document what they did so they can get paid for it. Patient care is not at all part of that consideration. The record is also the main source for defending what you did, say in court, if you are challenged or sued. The result is that documentation, doctors entering things in the record, has eaten more and more of our time. Patients and families know this well, and the chorus of complaints about it is rising. Doctors may only rarely make eye contact these days as they stare at a computer screen and type or click boxes. But we don’t have much choice if we are to get the crucial documentation done. That’s how we (and our hospitals) are paid, and payers are demanding more and more complex and arcane documentation. I don’t know what the answer is, but I do think we are approaching a breaking point. We are supposed to see as many patients as we can. But the rate-limiting step is documentation.
To some extent, we brought this on ourselves. In our fee-for-service system physicians once more or less said to payers: “We did this — trust us, we did it — now pay us for it.” I can’t think of a formula more guaranteed to cause over-utilization or even outright fraud. But there is only so much time in the day. In my world, an ever-smaller proportion of it is spent actually with the patient.
Christopher Johnson is a pediatric intensive care physician and author of Keeping Your Kids Out of the Emergency Room: A Guide to Childhood Injuries and Illnesses, Your Critically Ill Child: Life and Death Choices Parents Must Face, How to Talk to Your Child’s Doctor: A Handbook for Parents, and How Your Child Heals: An Inside Look At Common Childhood Ailments. He blogs at his self-titled site, Christopher Johnson, MD.
Image credit: Shutterstock.com
