Hey Siri, how do I slash my medical documentation time?

What would you do to get your medical documentation time down? And I mean, way down. (Personally, everything legal and possibly several illegal…kidding…on the latter at least.) Fortunately, a very legal option could change your practice and your life: practice extenders.

How much time do you spend on notes and documentation in a week?

Take that a step further, how much of that medical documentation time is simply copying information from elsewhere in a patient’s chart or off a referral? How many clicks (and seconds) are you painstakingly spending adding the medication and allergy lists?

For myself, that was 2 hours per week. TWO. HOURS.  How do I know? In my first months of practice, I spent Sunday mornings prepping my consults for the coming week by selecting the correct template and adding in the past medical, medications and allergies that came on the referral. (Agree this is a questionable use of a Sunday.)

2 hours of what should have been “life” time was spent copying provided information. This didn’t even include that week’s follow up or procedure notes.

Part of your documentation may not require a MD to do.  Hello, practice extender.

Brief recap: we’re considering a practice extender anyone who helps you get your job done. In other words, someone who helps you get the job done the best way not just the most efficient way.

A practice extender doesn’t necessarily need to have specific medical training (ie RN, LPN, PA, MA) depending on the role you want them to fill.

Back to the story. After recognizing that loading templates could be done by someone else with relatively minimal training, my colleagues and I hired an employee to prep the coming week’s consults using our templates.

Identifying this as a piece of the medical documentation puzzle that I didn’t need to do, I saved 2 hours weekly for the cost of less than one hour of my hourly rate.

For anyone keen on financials – how good is that for return on investment?

You can share the weight of all the medical documentation time

Documentation time is statistically the thing you’re working on in the evenings or keeping you after a long day.

Some of that documentation absolutely needs to be done by you or get your stamp of approval, but a potentially soul-saving question might be: does the entirety of the documentation for a given patient need to be done by you? Maybe not. And this might just change your practice and your life.

The great news is that documentation prep could be integrated into a variety of different types of positions in your practice. This could be a part-time employee who does just this, incorporated into your admin’s tasks (just make sure they have the time(!)) or part of another practice extender’s role.

Getting your notes prepped isn’t limited to consults. Any type of visit is a candidate – follow up notes, procedures, phone appointments – you just need a template.

Having fully succumbed to template addiction, now except for emergency and last-minute add ons, every single one of my notes is prepped.

Collectively, this saves at least 4.5 hours per week. An hour per day or half a weekend day. And this is in addition to the inherent time-saving power of templates (win-win).

You don’t think selecting a template and adding certain information takes so much time, but apparently those minutes and seconds add up.

Doing only the parts of documentation that you need to do = more time for life

What could you do with an extra hour in your day?

• Get home to the fam?
• Maybe *gasp* do something for yourself?
• See more patients to bump up that income further (hello, FIRE)?
• Take more days while maintaining your income?

Documentation is the un-sexy part of your job and likely the thing that is eating away your time (and soul?). A simple question with potentially huge impact – which part of that documentation do you need to do, and which part could be done by someone else?

There’s no doubt you are super efficient at doing notes….but is doing the entirety of them yourself the best way to get them done?

What other tips do you have to get your documentation time down? Share in the comments.