Will Humphreys (YouTube creator) introduces a short video about the burden of clinical documentation in outpatient settings. He frames documentation as a major pain point, previews that he will explain why documentation is problematic, how employer practices worsen it, and how to calculate expected weekly documentation hours.
So it's the end of the day and you're finally done with your patient care, and now you have a pile of notes that you've got to tackle, and it makes you feel like this.
In this video, we're going to talk specifically as to why documentation is such a problem in healthcare, what your employer and you are doing to make it worse. And then finally, we're going to talk about how many hours per week you should expect to get your notes done. Coming right up.
Documentation is absolutely the worst part of our job. I know it's important, but to me, at the end of the day, notes are the devil.
And so if you're new to this channel, please consider clicking subscribe because I make videos like these every day to help you increase your income, your impact. And like today, we're talking about freedom. So I remember driving home in my car and having so many paper charts piled up next to me that the same seatbelt alarm was sounding because it thought there was a human being sitting next to me in the car. So as we talk about the number of hours you should be spending documenting every week, I first want to take a poll. Please click the card that you see show up on the screen right now and survey and find out how many hours people are spending every week above patient care documenting their notes. So why is documentation such a problem in healthcare? Well. Well, there's two major drivers that is causing the problem that we experience today. The first is an ever growing litigious society. The second reason is insurance regulation. Insurances are incentivized to not pay health care providers. So as a result of that, they make it more difficult for us to qualify through things like required documentation. As an owner of a PT practice and a billing company, I've been able to experience this as an intentional effort to make it harder for us to get paid. And so, year after year, as reimbursements go down, the requirements in documentation go up. Notice this. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This is an insane situation. And so the brave men and women who go into private practice, they face decreasing reimbursements with increasing demands on paperwork. This is a hard situation, but they end up usually asking you to see more patients and doing additional work and paperwork in the same number of hours, which of course you're not going to be able to do. So you end up taking those notes home on nights and on weekends. I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow. All that being said, there are things that you're doing that are complicating the number of hours you spend doing notes. The first mistake most pts make is that they catch up and not keep up. It is exponentially more efficient to keep up with your notes throughout the day and wrap them up in a single day than it is to take them home and have them pile up. Now, again, I understand there are employers that are expecting such a high volume of production that that's literally impossible. But if there are people on your team who are able to go home with little to no notes, immediately go find out how they're keeping up. Number two, I often find that with all these different EMR products and the changes they're making, the need to get training on that system is vit for pts to not spend excessive time doing documentation. And then number three, they oftentimes don't work with their employers around their hours. They keep it quiet, they let it bottle up, and then it explodes into being either burned out or angry. So how many hours should you spend documenting above your patient care per week? Now, in this case, we're talking specifically about outpatient physical therapy clinics. And since there's such a variability from state to state, state and reimbursement and volume expectations, I've created a formula to help my clients get super clear of what that number should be, Remembering that the ultimate goal is to create such efficiency that our pts are going home without notes every day. Some have achieved that, but the majority use this formula. The first thing I need you to calculate is your visits per hour. Take the total number of patient visits you're expected to see in a week and divide that by 40. That gives you your baseline number. So based off that number, we're going to tell you how many hours you should expect. If you're in Alaska and your average is 40 visits a week, you divide that by 40, which gives you one visit per hour. In that case, you should have zero hours spent doing notes outside of patient care. If you're in Arizona and you're expected to see 60 visits per week, 60 divided by 40 is 1.5. At 0.5, we increase the number of hours you should be doing in paperwork three to five hours per week. So if that means if you're in New York and you're expected to see 80 or 90 visits per week, which happens, then you can expect to see 6 to 10 hours of documentation added to your schedule. So please remember that no matter what your expectation is, your clinic will ebb and flow. And as a salaried employee, you are expected to expand and contract with your company to some degree, but at least now you have a baseline what the average should feel and look like so that you can make decisions around where you want to live and and how much work life balance you can achieve. Do you disagree with me? I'd love to hear about what I missed in the comments below. Either way, thank you for watching. Until next time.
