More than 600 regulatory requirements govern U.S. hospitals, health systems and post-acute care clinicians—requirements that can add costs, hinder patient care and fuel physician dissatisfaction and burnout.
Surveys conducted by Doximity and Physicians’ Foundation have shown that 40% of physicians believe regulatory burdens are a major source of dissatisfaction in practicing medicine and 46% believe that efforts to reduce administrative burden would be the most effective intervention to reduce burnout.
Those statistics were cited in a recently published article in Compliance Today, a journal for members of the Health Care Compliance Association. The article’s authors examined physician and compliance leaders’ shared accountability to reduce physicians’ regulatory burdens and promote well-being.
“Protecting physicians’ well-being and mitigating burnout may not be the compliance professional’s first priority; however, with the right amount of collaboration we imagine a symbiotic system in which improvements to physician well-being happen organically as a result of better, more in-tune compliance policies,” the authors wrote.
The article was co-written by Kevin Hopkins, MD, physician director of health system engagement, and Lindsey Carlasare, senior manager for research and policy—both of the AMA—along with Robyn Hoffmann, senior manager of compliance at the consulting firm of Berry, Dunn, McNeil & Parker LLC.
“While intended to protect the organization from risk, overinterpreting regulations or standards can lead to unnecessary administrative burdens, contributing to inefficiencies, safety risks, bottlenecks and stress,” the authors wrote.
In the article, they outlined seven steps that physicians and compliance officers can take to work together to find areas where a policy may be an over- or misinterpretation of a rule, or root out tasks that someone other than a physician can be taking on. These include reviewing medication lists with patients and determining which chronic daily medications are due for renewal.
This type of administrative burden on physicians “is associated with lower professional satisfaction, higher job stress, and higher burnout, and takes time that could be spent on higher-value, more engaging work for which a physician is uniquely qualified,” says the article.
Notably, research has shown that health care executives and managers had full control to change 78% of rules that physicians and patients identified as obstructive and wasteful.
As the leader in physician well-being, the AMA is reducing physician burnout by removing administrative burdens and providing real-world solutions to help doctors rediscover the Joy in Medicine™.
Seven steps to working together
The article details seven strategies for compliance officers and physicians to use to work together to reduce unnecessary burdens and drive down doctor burnout.
Commit to advance the Quadruple Aim. Improving the well-being of physicians and other health professionals is one of the four areas that the Quadruple Aim targets to optimize health care delivery. Compliance and clinical leadership can collaborate to help address sources of burnout for physicians and other clinicians.
Create plan-do-study-act (PDSA) testing together. The PDSA model asks what is going to be done, how it will be done, what the results were and what changes will be made based on the finding. It can be used to test proposed changes to workflows, such as simplified compliance training format, coding-review workflows, inbox management and more.
Conduct executive-leadership rounds. This can be a tool for leaders to find out what is going well and what needs to be improved. Leaders can ask questions that matter to the staff, shine light on what’s right, and emphasize the importance of well-being.
Include physicians or other health professionals on the compliance committee. Having these voices in the room is vital to developing and evaluating the organization’s compliance work plan, assessing education and training programs and assessing and improving policies and procedures.
Communicate with physicians succinctly. Keep sentences to 20 words or less, limit paragraphs to two or three sentences and use common, simple words, avoiding jargon.
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Test various compliance and clinical leadership huddles to see what works best. Establish a process for regular communication. Will you meet virtually or in person? Will the meeting take place weekly or biweekly?
Be available to put questions about regulations into plain English. Compliance professionals should have an open-door policy on answering questions about regulations and other requirements for physicians and other clinicians.
Learn more from Dr. Hopkins and Hoffmann by watching an AMA webinar they recorded together on debunking regulatory myths (CME available).
The AMA “Debunking Regulatory Myths” series answers questions physicians and administrators have about whether a certain practice is really necessary to meet compliance requirements. The easy-to-understand explanations provide resources to reduce guesswork and administrative burdens.
An AMA STEPS Forward® resource called “Reducing Regulatory Burden Playbook: Avoid Overinterpreting the Rules” provides pointed questions that physicians can ask administrators and other decision-makers when they are told, among other things, that something is a regulatory requirement or that they need to get into compliance with something as soon as possible.
