Ah, this is the meat of the matter. I asked my doctor why he is making the huge effort to “go digital” (and it was indeed a huge effort) and he said “well, at this point I can’t submit most things on paper anymore so anything on paper has to be typed in anyway before submitting”. And the difference between 1969 and now? Well, the sheer volume of stuff that is recorded and stored. I’ll give you a trivial example - in 1969, after falling and ripping my chin open, I needed stitches. My mom took me to the docs house/office (it was one and the same at the time), and my mom and the nurse held me down while the doc stitched me up. Took a few minutes and that’s it, it was over. Nobody wrote anything down other than a slip of paper with the bill on it. Probably 10 bucks or so, because it was less than 5 minutes of work (even including coming back in 10 days to remove the stitches which the nurse did on her own). Blue Cross had nothing to with it, BC was limited to “real” major medical stuff. Not a single form was submitted to BC for my stitches. Today, on the other hand, if I take one of my kids to urgent care for a fall, there are 20 “codes” that are submitted, from the visual evaluation, to the ubiquitous X-ray, then the measurement of the cut, then the stitching (the needle, the thread, the labor, etc), then the antibacterial ointment, then the bandage, etc. There are form to fill out, and there are all those codes submitted to insurance. Every one of those steps has a document associated with it, and every one has to be stored. And if any of the codes are entered incorrectly, it’ll be denied, and then a whole new round of submissions will occur. Then, when I bring the kid back a week later, there are a whole set of codes for removal of stitches (“Suture removal in a primary care office following an ED visit”, code 15853, and maybe 15834, etc). And ALL that stuff has to be stored.
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