Successful time studies in healthcare don’t focus on physicians. They focus on everyone else.
This idea goes against the foundational logic of nearly all healthcare time studies, which is that time studies are a lot of hassle, so the focus should only be on capturing the highest-value hours. Physicians’ hours, in other words.
This logic might make sense, but the data doesn’t support it. On average, physicians account for only 11% of the total funding generated by time studies.
Why is this the wrong approach? Two reasons:
The first is numbers. By design, there are fewer physicians than other care workers. In time studies where multiple types of healthcare workers participate (like those done in transplant centers), physicians are outnumbered on average 5:1. The result? 86% of time recorded in time studies comes from people other than physicians.
The second is psychology. Physicians, like everyone in healthcare, are overburdened with administrative responsibilities. Charting, EMR entry, meetings, calls—every physician carries these frustrations around like a heavy back pack as they trudge wearily from patient to patient.
But as we said, there are simply fewer physicians, and the act of saddling them with an administrative task like time studies often feels like too much. They feel trapped, so they use the only thing they can to escape: Leverage.
They flat out refuse to participate in the time studies. Gasp!
I already hear some of you protesting “But physicians are required by CMS to do time studies!” While that statement is largely correct, there is one key distinction that is often left unsaid:
“Physicians are required by CMS to do time studies…if the hospital wants to get paid by CMS for their time.”
That last clause is the game changer. When physicians don’t do time studies, their hospitals are not actually losing money, they are just forgoing a chance to claim money they’re owed from CMS. It’s like not claiming a tax credit on your annual return—you may leave some money on the table, but your day-to-day finances won’t really be impacted.
That clause is also why physicians have leverage. If they refuse to do their time studies, it’s a win for them (one less admin task) and not a loss for the hospital (since it didn’t actually lose money). Obviously, overcoming this mindset is a challenge for hospital leaders.
In response, hospital administrators usually float time studies as a way to improve efficiency (yawn) or more fully capitalize on existing opportunities (sounds tedious). But in the end, they must figure that income ignored is somehow not the same as income lost, and they let the physicians’ time studies go unsubmitted.
This is why we encourage our customers to focus on a “big tent” approach to capturing time and claimable costs from time studies. Stop focusing solely on physicians and expand your attention to the dieticians, pharmacists, social workers, coordinators, educators, administrators and others. The goal is to make time studies easier for everyone. If collectively we can do that, one of our prizes will be to debunk this longstanding myth that “time studies are only for physicians” and replace it with “the more the merrier!”
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