HJBR Jan/Feb 2020

52 JAN / FEB 2020 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE COLUMN INSURANCE REDUCING WASTE IN HEALTH CARE: THE PHYSICIAN’S ROLE Approximately 30 percent, or $530 billion, of annual health care spending is attribut- ed to waste, or the delivery of medically unnecessary care that does not improve pa- tient outcomes. Interestingly, the lion’s share of that amount is attributed to adminis- trative complexity. The Categories of Waste The term “waste” is a broad one that generally refers to care that does not im- prove patient health. There are actually six categories of waste: over treatment, failures of care coordination, failures in execution of care processes, administra- tive complexity, pricing failures, and fraud and abuse. While most of these categories apply to the care received or not received by pa- tients, the category of administrative com- plexity is the most costly. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicated that the an- nual cost of administrative complexity to the U.S. health care system is as much as $389 billion. Administrative Complexity In modern health care, physicians must do far more than deliver medical care to their patients.They are also responsible for juggling the different billing systems of a multi-payer system; adopting, implement- ing, and maintaining expensive electronic health record systems; and completing required record keeping tasks, among nu- merous other administrative tasks. In fact, a 2016 study by the American Medical Association found that doctors spend nearly twice as much time com- pleting these tasks (49 percent) as they do actually seeing their patients (27 percent). The study further reported that for every hour physicians are providing direct clini-