Rush Hour

40-45% feel “rushed out of the doctor's office” but there’s a new trend that patients are noticing that is impacting behavior, or will. During the intake part of your annual physical, the medical assistants who take your blood pressure are also going through a series of questions more often, about your nerves and anxiety - like on a 0 to 3 scale, if 3 is most of the time and 0 is never, how often during the week does your heart race? For those with anxiety or panic disorders, many say “2” but we have reports that the assistants are noticing the patient’s nerves in this moment and try to make them feel comfortable. “It’s fine, it’s fine - I’m going to put a 1 down,” an assistant told a 49-year-old recently. In one case, a patient overheard her medical assistant getting a high 5 for “doing the screening in under 12 minutes.”

This is all to say that this new emphasis on screening for depression and anxiety and social risk factors that could impact your health are great developments, but are the incentives aligned? Will this new process alter our answers? It seems like the medical assistant, despite best of intentions, is encouraged to not only do these screenings faster, but to tinker with the scores. This is partly due to the pressures on medical offices to capture more information to get paid more by insurers and to continue to pump through patients. Rushing is one thing, but if our screening system isn’t more accurate then we have a bigger issue.