April 9, 2010

Doctors and Patients, Lost in Paperwork

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…Paperwork, or documentation, takes up as much as a third of a physician’s workday; and for many practicing doctors, these administrative tasks have become increasingly intolerable, a source of deteriorating professional morale

 

According to a study published earlier this year, residents now spend up to twice as much time on documentation as their counterparts did two decades earlier. Analyzing the results of a national survey of over 15,000 trainees in internal medicine, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found that a majority of residents reported spending as many as six hours a day documenting, while only a small fraction of residents spent as much time with patients…

 

“Residents are learning a lot of their medicine from the computer,” said Dr. Amy S. Oxentenko, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic. “That does nothing to foster the relationship with the patient.”

 

NY Times, by Pauline Chen 4/8/2010

 

Additional coverage: NY Times (Well blog)

Tags: Dr. Amy S. Oxentenko, General Internal Medicine, paperwork

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