Corporate medicine exploits doctors and nurses

Danielle Ofri, a physician at Bellevue Hospital and New York University writes that “corporate medicine has milked just about all the ‘efficiency’ it can out of the system. With mergers and streamlining it has pushed the productivity numbers about as far as they can go. But one resource that seems endless—and free—is the professional ethic of medical staff members.” What she’s saying is that most doctors and nurses are committed to doing the right thing for their patients and that the system takes advantage of them. Demands on them keep escalating “without a commensurate expansion of time and resources,” yet they continue uphold their professional ethics—sometimes at great personal cost—and try not to stint and caring for their patients. The nurse doesn’t take a lunch break; the doctor squeezes in the extra patients; evenings and weekends are dedicated to catching up with medical records, and so forth.

Here’s what’s happening:

• Primary care doctors spend nearly two hours entering information into the computer for every hour of direct patient care.
• Patients are sicker than in the past: more chronic conditions; more illnesses to treat; more medications to handle.
• Burnout levels among doctors are at new highs and increasing; doctors and nurses commit suicide at higher rates than in almost any profession.
• There are now roughly 10 administrators for every doctor. (From 1975 to 2010 the number of health care administrators increased 3,200 percent).

What are those administrators doing? I suppose a lot of them are entering the codes used by insurance companies. She doesn’t say, but they don’t sound like they do much good for the medical staff.

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