Reducing physician burnout: How technology solutions can ease administrative burdens

Neeraj Sharma: ©Santéch

While physician burnout has declined from its peak during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of all physicians still report experiencing it. Among the primary contributors of burnout, administrative burdens are cited as the leading cause. The consequences are severe —burnout leads to high turnover, staffing shortages, patient delays and increased medical errors, ultimately impacting patient care.

Beyond EHRs: The hidden challenge of payor directory compliance

Managing EHRs and patient communications are widely recognized as administrative challenges for physicians. However, there are lesser-known but equally burdensome tasks that significantly contribute to stress within practices. One of the most pressing is maintaining accurate practice information with payors and ensuring timely credentialing and recredentialing.

Today’s providers and their staff spend countless hours navigating payor requirements, filling out redundant credentialing forms, and correcting payor directory inaccuracies. The reality is that most health care organizations still rely on manual processes to meet these requirements. This includes sending letters or emails to addresses that no longer exist or in some cases making phone calls trying to obtain the most current practice information. Ultimately, it is not only inefficiency but also a direct barrier to better patient care – a burden that weighs on physicians leading to frustration and burnout.

Regulatory bodies such as CMS and certain state regulatory agencies require providers to be correctly listed in payor directories. Non-compliance can result in financial penalties, sanctions or even removal from payor networks, many times with the provider office not even being aware. This dynamic is extremely disruptive to a practice’s ability to demonstrate that they are in network and have the ability to serve patients with different insurance plans. The real challenge is that while regulations around payor directory accuracy and provider data integrity continue to grow, practices aren’t equipped with the tools to manage these requirements efficiently. Compliance should be effortless, not an operational nightmare. The health care industry needs solutions that automate these processes, eliminate repetitive administrative work, and free up providers to focus on what truly matters—delivering care. Ultimately, these burdens have a toll on the physician practices:

• The average practice manages 20+ health plan contracts, each requiring separate platforms to send information in different formats, and timelines. After sending this information, much of the time, practices do not even know if their information was received and updated in payor systems.
• Maintaining credentialed status with all the health plans requires keeping up with and updating new credentials, licensure information, address changes, phone number changes, and any other change which may occur within a physician’s practice.
• Practices spend at least one full staff day per week on average calling payors and manually updating payor directories. This includes time spent finding and calling the right department, and often spending long periods of time waiting on hold. All this is multiplied by numerous payors.
• The total cost of maintaining accurate provider directory data amounts to $2.8 billion annually, according to the California Association for Healthcare Quality. Yet there is no call to action to organize and create more efficiencies to bring down these costs.

Simply put: The burden of these administrative requirements is overwhelming for providers who should be focusing on delivering patient care.

Technology’s role in easing the burden

To address these inefficiencies, new technology solutions are transforming how healthcare providers manage payor data. Provider Data Management (PDM) platforms improve interoperability and significantly reduce the time and resources required for maintaining accurate provider information. By automating workflows and providing real-time status reporting, these solutions streamline the credentialing process, make directory updates doable with a click of a button, and provide compliance tracking reporting to ensure there are no looming risks.

The benefits of automation in provider data management include:

• Fewer claim denials and proper reporting of patient balances – Ensuring timely and accurate data submissions minimizes reimbursement delays and provides correct patient billing statements.
• Improved cash flow – Adding new doctors to a payor’s network when they join the practice or adding a new location in a timely way can lead to an improved revenue cycle.
• Reduced operational costs – Automation eliminates manual work such as calling payors to obtain credentialing status or updating an address. This allows practices to free physicians from administrative work to focus on patient care and/or reallocate administrative staff to more important tasks that directly affect patients.
• Higher patient volumes – Accurate listings in directories ensure that potential new patients see providers who have openings in their panels, which allows practices to accept more patients into their office.

Physician burnout isn't just about EHRs or patient load—it’s deeply connected to the outdated, manual processes that plague health care administration. For too long, provider data management has been antiquated, tedious, and time consuming. New technologies including PDM platforms are starting to directly alleviate many of the administrative burdens for both payors and providers–all resulting in a better healthcare ecosystem.

Neeraj Sharma is a health care technology leader with over 25 years of experience in simplifying health care IT for payors, networks and health care organizations. As President & CEO of Santéch, Neeraj focuses on building simple, scalable solutions that enable transformation in network and provider data management.