9 ways to create time in your busy day – practical tips for doctors

As physicians, you’ll always be asked to do more. But with what extra time? You protect time for patients, time for the paperwork and the obstacle course of everything else – checking your patient portal, your inbox, lab results, reports, script refills, consult letters, meetings, forms and questions from staff. Canadian charting coach and family physician Dr. Sarah Smith knows this all too well and offered the following suggestions during OntarioMD’s recent digital health symposium to help you make small steps toward sustainable change allowing you to go home without bringing today’s work into tomorrow.

1. Schedule time for your in-basket or inbox. Opening a file and closing it again is doing the work twice. Schedule time daily to do it once. Think about how best to use that time and what priority makes sense for you
2. Keep it simple. Complete in-basket or inbox tasks in fewer steps or clicks. For example, when you first write a script for thyroid medication or a statin, leave a note for yourself about why so you’ll know later if it can be refilled without a further test
3. Watch for repetition in requests. If your staff keep asking you what to do when a patient wants an earlier appointment, set rules and processes so that non-physician staff can handle non-physician work and keep it out of your in-basket
4. Minimize interruptions. Set a rule about when your patient protected time can be interrupted. Unless it’s crowning, bleeding or seizing, everything else should be added to a worklist
5. Avoid decision fatigue. Make sure your staff get important information ahead of time to enable them to make decisions. For example, if you can’t take late appointments on Thursdays because your daughter has soccer, let them know
6. Develop access strategies. Experiment with the time of day you schedule for urgent or complicated tasks. Does getting these done in the morning mean you can go home on time? Shift responsibility for booking follow-ups to patients with messaging such as, “I’m going to arrange an MRI. When you get your appointment, book time with me seven days after that.”
7. Try to run on time without creating homework. Make sure appointment lengths include the time needed to complete the necessary tasks. Look for any tool, template, shorthand or strategy that saves time. For example, consider AI scribes for charting
8. Schedule more time for more issues. Learn phrases and practice the skills of deferring tasks that don’t fit within the day’s patient encounter. For example, “Your back pain is important, let’s schedule time later to talk about that.”
9. Seek out tools to optimize patient time. Consider what tool, team member or resource could be used to maximize efficiency in the room with the patient. For instance, education about nutrition, exercise and counselling could be provided in a warm hand-off to someone in your community

Wendy McCann is a North Bay-based writer.