Eight primary care doctors held a news conference Wednesday to ask state officials to reduce their paperwork load and avoid a shortage of doctors in the near future.
The event was believed to be the first time so many primary care doctors came together to speak about a single issue, according to Patrick Flood, the chief executive officer of Northern Counties Health Care in the Northeast Kingdom.
Flood said the high turnout to an event that drew only about a dozen in the audience was a sign the issue is an important one: Physicians are burning out from having to fill out paperwork for insurance companies and accountable care organizations.
“We are fearful that our communities will not have access to primary care in the future,” said Dr. Sharon Fine, a family doctor in Danville. “We are burning out due to the increased excessive documentation … that (has) little clinical value, and by using electronic medical records.”
A new trend, doctors said, is a requirement that they check boxes on a computer for so-called quality measures. Different health care reform entities require the check-boxes so they can collect data on whether the doctor is performing quality health care.
The doctors said the paperwork makes their area of medicine unattractive to students who are considering what kind of doctor to be. And they said that without enough people training to be primary care doctors — who include family doctors, internal medicine physicians and pediatricians — Vermont could face a crisis in primary care.
They said access to primary care doctors is already an issue. No county in Vermont has enough full-time primary care doctors to meet the level recommended by the U.S. Department of Health, according to the group’s data.
“We’re not talking about money,” said Dr. Paul Reiss, a family doctor in Williston. “We’re not talking about payment. We’re really talking about reducing the time that’s taken away from patient care.”
“The reason these folks cannot partake typically in health care reform is that they are usually seeing patients or entering data,” he said. “That’s it.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Doctors renew battle cry for health reform that cuts paperwork.
