Michael Tutty, PhD, MHA, knows from experience that one way to improve professional satisfaction is to make it possible for physicians to spend more time practicing medicine and less time focused on paperwork or electronic health records. That is particularly true for physicians in private practices.
"What makes physicians passionate about their work is caring for patients," said Tutty, the group vice president of professional satisfaction and practice sustainability at the AMA. “What is burdensome are all those administrative burdens that the health care system layers on the practice of medicine that makes it harder to provide care.”
Tutty shared how the AMA is helping private practice physicians improve efficiencies during a recent episode of “AMA Moving Medicine.”
Simple solutions for private practices
Private practice physicians have been overwhelmed with administrative responsibilities for years, ranging from prior authorization and rising inflation to increased costs and difficulties recruiting staff. Those burdens have only grown during the past two-plus years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To help offset those burdens, the AMA has launched AMA Private Practice Simple Solutions, a rapid learning cycle opportunity that allows doctors to learn from—and with—each other on a range of relevant topics.
You took care of the nation. It’s time for the nation to take care of you. It’s time to rebuild. And the AMA is ready. The AMA Recovery Plan for America’s Physicians is rebuilding critical components of our profession by:
The Simple Solutions program will feature a collection of eight-week learning sessions. Each session will begin with a webinar on a specific topic. Afterward, an online forum will be made available to registrants, where they can interact with one another, ask questions of the webinar speaker, and highlight other best practices and opportunities inspired by the talk. Six weeks into the session, a second webinar will be released that features and responds to content from the online forum.
It takes astute clinical judgment as well as a commitment to collaboration and solving challenging problems to succeed in independent settings that are often fluid, and the AMA offers the resources and support physicians need to both start and sustain success in private practice.
Find out more about the AMA Private Practice Physicians Section, which seeks to preserve the freedom, independence and integrity of private practice.
More than just a webinar
The first Simple Solutions session is focused on E/M documentation and launched in July. Future sessions in 2022 will touch on team documentation and recruiting. The first team documentation webinar is scheduled for the week of Sept. 8; the first session on recruiting will be held the week of Sept. 22.
More information on future session topics will be made available at a later date. Those with suggestions of possible topics should contact the Private Practice team.
"While many of these ideas could help all physicians, regardless of their practice setting," Tutty said, "we're tailoring each of these webinars specifically to those in private practice."
The goal of Simple Solutions is to be more than a webinar. The focus is on building communities and helping private practice physicians grow.
Tutty thinks AMA Private Practice Simple Solutions can help do just that.
"In each of these eight-week learning cycles, we'll delve into a different topic—small nuggets of things that practices can embark on," he said. "If you keep stacking up these wins over the course of the year, you can really transition your practice to remove some of those administrative burdens and create a more successful and fulfilling private practice for yourself."
“AMA Moving Medicine” highlights innovation and the emerging issues that impact physicians and public health today. You can catch every episode by subscribing to the AMA’s YouTube channel or the audio-only podcast version, which also features educational presentations and in-depth discussions.
