Here Endeth the Clerical Sabbath
Why weekends matter...a bit
I’ve been a bit of a slave to paperwork lately. It has left me quite frustrated, because I’m either uploading documents from my computer, printing forms that for some reason I cannot manage to do online, or filling in the forms I printed. (Old curmudgeon that I have become, I could hold forth on my abiding disdain for printers and their manufacturers, but I’ll leave that for another tirade.)
I cannot hold anyone in particular responsible as my recent experiences have just been a kind of perfect storm of clerical work, a confluence of required documentation arriving simultaneously.
Forms are just part of modern life, whether physician or attorney, educator or police officer or anyone in between. They can take up staggering amounts of time, whether they are done online or the old-fashioned way with pen and paper. (Online can actually be worse for those of us in rural areas with horse-drawn or water-powered Internet service.)
My specialty of emergency medicine does not involve the endless pre-authorization forms and other nightmares of office practice, so I feel especially sorry for all of my colleagues laboring in specialties in which the amount of clerical work would make Sisyphus emrace his boulder fondly by comparison.
Whether filling out credentialing papers for a hospital, renewing a medical license or even for personal business matters, it seems that as I get older the stack of papers just seems to get higher.
I also believe, and I’ll stick to this, that there is somewhere a dark, secret, international organization which is in charge of forms. This nefarious cabal meets with regularity. I imagine them having very nice, catered meals and much laughter. But when they get down to business it’s never about fewer forms, or shorter forms, or more efficient forms.
I feel certain they are dedicated to repetition, so that my signature needs to be present at least once or twice on both sides of the same form. They also love irrelevant information. I also know that there is a subcommittee charged with frustration. Perhaps they are recruited from CIA psy-ops folks. Their mission, their raison d’etre, is to ask the most complicated question and require that it be answered in the smallest possible space.
In the space provided, please give list the locations and dates of all schools from which you have graduated, with teacher’s names, beginning with K-4. ________.
As I said, some of this sort of thing comes to us via the ‘convenience’ of email, which means that it follows us anywhere we make ourselves available via our smart-bosses, sorry, smart-owners, no, no, smart-phones and computers. Heck, nowadays maybe smart refrigerators remind people. I don’t have one, but I could see it: ‘Richard, you need cheddar cheese. And don’t forget to complete and submit your quarterly taxes…’
Reminders also come via voice-mail or text. The forms, or the reminders to do forms, to delve back into the soul-crushing labor of filling out page after page, always come to us one way or another. Those who send them and follow-up on them are passionate and dedicated. Like John Wick. To the extent that they help make our bureaucratic world go round, perhaps we owe them a kind word. But that’s a tough sell after a long week of printing and form completion.
The interesting thing I’ve observed, however, is that the weekend can sometimes be a kind of ‘document sabbath.’ You see, I find that if I’m behind on such things, and know that I’ll be reminded, and if I can make it to say, noon on Friday, the emails, texts and voice mails kind of slow down…or stop. Everything is critical until suddenly, it isn’t.
In the same way that physicians can order critically important radiological procedures…until about 5 PM on weekdays…after which they just aren’t important enough to be available.
So during the week I kind of run forward breathlessly towards Friday. I do what I can, knowing that even the evil form makers will be resting. Althought I suspect they’ll be off at Cabo at some wicked form-making convention, deciding whether or not to mandate that we use purple ink, or that we return to carbon copies or that we enter our data onto forms online but backwards for security, and in Welsh.
I write this on Sunday night, still reveling in a bit of escape from the necessary burdens of modern life. In the morning, when the dear reader receives my letter, the forms will once again need to be addressed as emails and texts come to life and cross the office and circumavigate nation and world, imploring us all that the empty fields must be filled-out, the boxes completed, the irrelevant questions answered.
But take heart…
It will only be 4.5 more days until another clerical sabbath, and the sweet, but transient weekend of escape from screen and pen.
Until then have a great week!
Edwin
Ah, a victim of the sense of obligation to fill out forms and return them. I am here to attest to the possibility of remaining alive after reaching the point of simply refusing to fill out any more forms. To be honest, I no longer see patients and bill for services, but that's for different reasons. Over 3 decades, I built up an incredible, but completely common, raft of memberships in this quality assurance organization, that PPO, HMO, PRO, ORP, OPR (now I'm just kidding, changing the order of letters in the "acronym"), to be sure that if any wayward soul crossed my path with some obscure source of sponsorship for their health dilemma, I could be paid for a smidgen for consulting, offering treatment and occasionally even performing an operation on their behalf. These memberships each have a term, a renewal process and a little life of their own. Here, almost 4 years after my last clinical assignment, I am still getting requests to update my clinical particulars with some of these organizations, who are apparently unable to see that I have submitted exactly zero claims in 4 years. I guess I would be responsible for sending in my own death certificate to get off their mailing list. Instead, I take the momentary pleasure of hitting the "delete" key and leaving them in their clerical confusion. I think I will go on existing in virtual reality long after my cold corpse has been laid to rest or turned to ashes, because I wasn't willing to fill out the paperwork to get OFF the list, as opposed to getting ON it. I recently found myself in a small dilemma over the requirement to renew and maintain one of the only certifications that has any personal meaning to me. I was tickled pink to hear from a person in that organization that they actually didn't care one iota about whether I had met the strict requirements of maintaining my status as long as I didn't do anything stupid and noone complained about me. REALLY? I can use my own good sense about whether I am competent to be credentialed for doing almost nothing described by the credential? Did I just drop down the rabbit hole into a parallel universe? Actually, the organization itself is dealing with the ludicrous requirements of maintaining certification and decided it is easier to only enforce the credential prerequisites "if there is a problem". I love that! it makes filling out the form to update my status so much easier! I think if I were accepting even a dime in compensation for professional services, everything would be completely different, but I'm not, so I'll happily comply with their fantasy status and do nothing, stay out of "trouble" and keep my membership card! If I ever do anything clinical again, i'll ask for supervised status until I am considered "up to date" and officially meet prerequisites for the certification. How imminently reasonable...I can hardly believe such pragmatism still exists somewhere!
Thank you, Ed, for this glimpse into the real life of a clerical physician...Monday again!