Hours of Time

MD-IT has long held the belief that physicians’ time is important and worth protecting. Through the many years of schooling, training and preparing, the practice of medicine requires tools and structure to ensure that the vast majority of a physician’s time is spent on patient care, not on data entry. Our products stand as a testament to these beliefs.

In a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the average physician collects roughly $75.00 per hour. This includes specialists and generalists, which skews the number lower given the increasingly less pay provided to Internal Medicine and Family Practice doctors.

Even at this rate, each and every hour a week wasted on documentation and inefficient technology affects a practice’s bottom line. Even if one hour a week is unnecessarily spent on documenting, and a physician works 47 weeks a year, the total loss of physician pay is over $3,500. If an EMR takes one extra hour a day to complete patient records, the total loss of pay is over $17,000 per physician.

This “back of the envelope” mathematics shows that interrupting physician time is incredibly detrimental to a practice’s finances.  This math does not take into consideration the total loss of revenue to a practice as it is only calculating the loss in take-home pay for the physician. When time is wasted by a physician, the entire practice suffers, when a physician is wisely using their time and focused on patient care and patient through-put, the practice’s financial health is preserved, and in most cases, improved.

In short, physicians do not embark on their chosen career to spend hours documenting and using computers, and in fact are losing revenue and frustrating themselves by doing so. Even if an EMR is already implemented, MD-IT can work with practices and doctors to recoup time back from their day for more productive tasks, and we will be sure to keep the conversation short and to the point, because in the end, time is money.