Digitalization gap among doctors: Almost one in five doctors still uses fax

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When was the last time you sent a fax? If you’re a doctor, it shouldn’t have happened this long ago. 17 percent of doctors regularly use a fax machine at work. This is the result of a recent survey conducted by the Swiss Association of Assistants and Senior Physicians (VSAO).

Prescriptions and certificates are sent by fax, like Spitex prescriptions or reports from GP practices to hospitals. And the fax machine is just the tip of the iceberg!

According to VSAO research, “poorly designed clinical information systems (PIS)” are even more problematic in terms of bureaucracy and digitalization accumulation. Hospital doctors enter diagnoses or drug prescriptions into the KIS. Sometimes, even within a hospital, there may be different systems in different wards that are not compatible with each other. Information is transferred manually from one system to another; This is also a waste of time.

Doctors are mostly office tires

The same goes for communicating with health insurance companies: 26 percent of survey respondents said they talk on the phone with their health insurance company two to four hours a week. Two-thirds of the questions from health insurance companies were unfair, according to survey respondents. In most cases, inquiries were made on paper rather than electronically.

Using the survey, VSAO collected more than 1,000 concrete examples of “inefficient bureaucracy and management.” “After long working days, doctors also have to carry out administrative work whose purpose is often unclear,” criticizes Philipp Thüler, deputy director general of the VSAO. “This is frustrating and drives many people to the brink of burnout.”

According to surveys, doctors work 56 hours a week; According to the labor law, this period is allowed for a maximum of 50 hours. Depending on the source, hospitalists spend only half their work time at the bedside, or even less. The rest goes to paperwork.

It takes hundreds of millions

“By reducing bureaucracy, you can kill two birds with one stone,” says Thüler: “Freeing up time for patient care. And reducing the frustration of laboriously writing reports that you don’t even know who will eventually read.”

Some even left the profession due to “administrative disaster,” according to the VSAO. Solution? It should introduce, among other things, the electronic patient record. But its introduction has been slow for years. The federal government’s Digisanté program aims to further promote digitalization in the healthcare system with a loan of 400 million. “This is a good start,” says Thüler. “But we have a huge backlog.” This cannot be achieved overnight.

Source :Blick