Want to save time in your practice? There’s a playbook for that

With 45.2% of physicians reporting burnout symptoms, chances are physicians in your practice likely spend way too much time on nonpatient-facing tasks, ones that contribute to emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and other signs of professional burnout.

The "AMA STEPS Forward® Saving Time Playbook" was updated in August and can help your ambulatory practice reduce burnout by optimizing teamwork and clinical operations to work smarter, not harder. In turn, physicians will have more time to take care of patients and themselves.

The AMA STEPS Forward program offers innovative, physician-developed strategies that allow physicians and their teams to thrive in the new health care environment. These resources can help you prevent physician burnout, create the organizational foundation for joy in medicine and improve practice efficiency.

The Saving Time Playbook highlights key messages and provides links to toolkits, webinars, podcasts and interactive tools you can use to initiate change in your practice today. Each playbook section offers a high-level overview of a topic area and allows you to dive deeper into that area at your own pace.

The AMA toolkit "is intended for physicians and leaders who seek to reduce administrative burden, improve practice efficiency and teamwork, and optimize day-to-day clinical operations," says the playbook’s introduction. AMA physician experts on practice redesign and physician well-being Marie Brown, MD, Jill Jin, MD, MPH, Jane F. Fogg, MD, MPH, and Kevin D. Hopkins, MD, are among the playbook’s authors.

The playbook recommends creating a multidisciplinary change team and offers strategies on how to bridge the "trust gap" between physicians and administrators. The AMA playbook also helps you use interactive calculators to make your business case for implementation and has new guidance on how to communicate thoughtfully to avert "a multitude of calls, emails and messages" that together "can be a detriment to patient safety and a source of workplace frustration and burnout."

End the unnecessary work

Physicians are all too familiar with the additional tasks piled on them resulting from widespread adoption of EHR systems. It’s just one example of unnecessary tasks that have become part of physicians’ and other clinicians’ workloads in the past decade.

The playbook can help your ambulatory physician practice save time by learning to:

• Eliminate unnecessary tasks and duplicative work. Discover how you can go about "getting rid of the stupid stuff," including a de-implementation checklist (PDF) to help get you started.
• Streamline prescribing and management of prescriptions for chronic illnesses. Learn how you can renew and synchronize all prescription renewals at the same visit once annually—saving you up to five hours a week.
• Optimize functional aspects of the EHR for physicians and care teams. Learn to manage your in-basket to save an hour or two of work daily and how to optimize your patient portal.

Share the necessary work

By standardizing and streamlining practice fundamentals or core workflows, physicians can save time during and between patient visits. This involves processes such as pre-visit planning, pre-visit laboratory testing, expanding rooming and discharge protocols, as well as team documentation. It can help a clinic run more smoothly and more easily handle unanticipated issues when they arise.

Save time by learning to:

• Use the current visit to prepare for the next. Discover how pre-visit planning and pre-visit laboratory testing can help.
• Work as a team to increase efficiency of rooming and discharge. Learn how nurses, medical assistants and other clinical support team members can use their skills to create smooth, efficient patient visits.
• Document the visit as a team to reduce burdens on physicians.