The phone structure is horrifically inefficient. A patient can’t call a clinic directly…if a pt calls a clinic, their call goes to their call center in Knoxville, where someone types up a message and forwards it to nursing staff at that clinic…then, the nursing staff at that specific clinic would needlessly retype the exact same message (paraphrased unnecessarily) and forwards it to the provider. I would receive 50-60 messages per day, even though “support” staff were fully capable and qualified to answer a vast majority of them. It was exhausting and impossible to keep up with charts because it was absolutely non-stop messages that I had to weed through, and maybe 4 out of 60 messages were questions that required a provider to answer. I can’t tell you how many times I had to handle a question like this: “Pt’s last OV (date), next appt (date). Patient will run out of his famotidine 40mg one tablet once a day prn before his next appointment. Ok to refill?”
And no matter how many times I told these staff members to please go ahead and handle things like this…I was repeatedly told, “I’m still going to ask you every time. I don’t want to get fired.”
That was one BIG problem that significantly affected patient care.
Other con:
having a nit-picky supervising physician who would try to “correct” me by telling me to do things that I had clearly already done, and were clearly documented at the time of the appointment. Every treatment that was ordered was automatically timestamped by the EMR and was there in plain sight. Every single time I was “corrected”, I had to tell this physician to go and see in the note that what he was recommending post-haste had already been done.
He would read a patient’s complaint, but would never read the rest of the note before meeting with me to tell me what I “should have done”. Extremely frustrating and a waste of time. These weekly meetings were only a distraction from actual work and lunch break.
Still, while frustrating, I loved and respected that physician. He’s an exceptional and patient physician who genuinely cares about his patients. I would trust him to care for any of my loved ones.