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Charging for patient messages? American Medical Association blasts physicians' inbox overload

Doctors should get time and money to answer patient messages, AMA delegates say.

By Allison Bell | November 12, 2024 at 11:30 AM
Credit: 18percentgrey/iStock

Physicians are talking about ways to fight Medicare reimbursement cuts, greedy corporations’ efforts to buy medical practices, and torrents of patient email.Members of a American Medical Association House of Delegates committee considered two resolutions addressing inbox overload this week at the AMA’s interim meeting in Orlando, Florida:1. One resolution on the Chicago-based group’s meeting agenda called for the AMA to “immediately collaborate with payers to seek adequate reimbursement for professional time answering questions on the patient portal not related to a recent visit.”2. A second resolution called for the AMA to develop more inbox management tools for member physicians, lobby for electronic health record tools that track how much time physicians spend managing their inboxes, and push to increase what payers pay for physicians answering email.Under the current rules, answering email makes “extraordinary demands on physician time,” and “physicians are burning out trying to keep up with this workload,” according to the second resolution, which was proposed by AMA member physicians from Texas. “Physicians do not get credit in institutional metrics or compensation for addressing in-basket messages.”

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