Primary care physicians report top administrative hassles

(HealthDay)—Primary care physicians report that the worst administrative hassles include pre-authorization for medications and tests and managing specialty care, according to an article published in Medical Economics.

The most common administrative burdens include pre-authorization for medications and tests, which is associated with a specific difficulty in that payers often require a specialist order for diagnostic test approval and specialists often want to see the test results before seeing the patient. In addition, primary care physicians report experiencing difficulty with obtaining and following up on specialty care for patients.

Other administrative burdens relate to patient records, which focus on charting for billing and coding based on preventing malpractice, rather than communicating the details of patient care. The rigidity of benchmarks is often cited as a burden, which does not account for the realities of patient care. Numerous alerts from laboratory facilities and hospital systems can lead to a phenomenon whereby providers ignore the alerts, potentially causing them to miss important alerts. Lack of compliance by the administrative side with its own rules, such as submitted paperwork getting lost or not being processed, can cause further hassle to physicians.

Suggestions for solutions to some of these problems include use of medical scribes, who can do billing and make calls to insurance companies, as well as examining the business model of medicine and learning how to benefit from some of the administrative steps.

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