paperwork paperwork

UKMail reports on a study showing that doctors working for the British health service spend more time on paperwork than on seeing patients.


and a Cornell study showed that US doctors spend four times as much time on paperwork than Canadian doctors.

the article attributes that to the "single pay" system there, but I'm not so sure.

In the USA, billing medicare/medicaid is very complicated, requiring diagnoses and complications/comorbidity with the appropriate numbers,  but when I visited a friend in Canada, he could bill for several patients on a single sheet of paper, with a single diagnosis not a number to justify the cost. That was 20 years ago so maybe things have changed.

Here is one example: you have to sign it, not your nurse/secretary/etc.

Hmm...wonder  if docs could get an automatic pen writing machine to do it...