Comment by friendzis

> The time burden on physicians is staggering — estimated at $68,000 per physician per year spent dealing with billing-related administrative matters

Having had my share in the administrative part of the medical field, that figure is most probably somewhat misleading. Every time you deal with billing you are bound to deal with granularity. On one extreme you could bill per case, on the other extreme you can count the paperclips used. It could seem at the first glance that the more you move towards the latter, the more time has to be spent by someone to somehow eventually form the invoice.

However, this surface-level conclusion misses the fact that patient care does not start and stop at the the operating room door. Some processes mandate transparency/traceability and thus documenting what's being done and used is part of the process anyway. [edit: the final deliverables are not a treated patient, but rather a treated patient and documentation complete with medicine authorizations / prescriptions (including for drugs used internally), sick-leave certificates, etc.]. That data is then effectively reused for billing, with minimal overhead hopefully. Yes, there's a lot of room for improvement and automatization, but activities not directly related to active care make up a sizable portion of the time.