However, in addition to the financial difficulty that primary care physicians find themselves in, there is the additional burden of merely trying to keep up with their day to day challenges. Whereas the “electronic medical record” (EMR) was supposed to make life easier for physicians, in fact for the most part the opposite has happened. Yes, it did solve the problem of not getting updated records from other physicians, but at what cost?
Many primary care physicians that I know often have to spend hours at home trying to complete the records for the patients that they had seen that day. Why? … because there is just enough time in a typical fifteen minute time slot, to actually connect with the patient and complete the EMR in that same time slot. So in reality what happens? Either, the physician must spend the entire fifteen minutes not looking at the patient, while keeping his/her eyes constantly on the keyboard … or, … the notes must be finished after the usual office hours.
In addition, if the patient has a more complicated medical problem, the primary care physician must, for his/her own survival, refer that patient to a specialist, which now has a long waiting list for appointments because of all the referrals from primary care.
To make matters even worse for primary care physicians, they are getting increasingly punished by administrators to see more patients in a day. More patients means more notes and more referrals and more time spent at home just trying to survive.
The other thing that happens is that some more experienced primary care doctors advance up the ladder into administration. Whereas one might think that having a ex-primary care physician looking after other primary care physicians would be a good thing, however, when they become administrators they seem to forget how difficult it was to make it through each day in the office.
Ergo, who is taking the side of the primary care physicians? No one is!
Is this an unanswerable problem?
From my perspective could it be that the only reasonable way to resolve this problem is for the primary care physicians to unionize?
6/14/24