Canadian doctors say they’re losing 20 million hours a year to unnecessary paperwork

Some excerpts:

Aziz is not alone. Doctors in Canada each spend, on average, nine hours per week on administrative tasks, totaling 42.7 million hours annually across the country, according to a new report from the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which surveyed 1,924 physicians.

The paperwork that fills Aziz’s mornings goes far beyond requisitioning tests and looking over lab work, the kind of things she says any doctor would expect to do.

It’s tracking down patient information that’s spread out over multiple systems. It’s resubmitting the exact same information multiple times because each pharmacy or clinic has its own specific forms.

Digitization isn't necessarily helping either, she said, because, oftentimes, the software that should be making things easier just isn't up to par.

"Sometimes it's one step forward, two steps back," she said. “You have to click a dozen boxes and then the patient's history won't populate because it has a dash, which is not an allowed character, you know?”