Yes and no. Often, I call the department secretary, who can pull up some record of what was actually done. If we still can’t figure it out, we pull the chart and read the actual report and decide from that. We can do most of this without bothering the physician, unless there are significant documentation problems.
Now with Medicare cracking down on documentation, more physicians are writing (or dictating) more and not less. QtM, however, doesn’t have to worry about insurance, and so probably reports what is necessary, not what the carriers want to see.
My handwriting is very clear, to the extent that everybody comments on it. Of course, I print all my scripts. Nevertheless, the pharmacist has saved my bacon a few times and I have no patients for doctors who treat pharmacists badly.
Medical schools need to add some drill on quality assurance programs. Any QA practioner will testify and can document that the most economical and safest way to do anything is to do it right the first time. There are a million excuses for doing slipshod work, and scribbling a prescription is slipshod work, none of which amount to a hill of beans.
MsRobyn, what you wrote frightens me a little. What you are saying is that on questionable prescriptions, you and the department secretary try to figure out what the prescription was without checking with the doctor. I believe that is called “enabling behavior” in that the doctor isn’t penalized for having put out a product that can’t be understood.
Mostly, the nurses and pharmacists reading the script/notes are used to that particular doc’s scribble. With a bit of squinting and a couple of consultations with others, the Rx usually becomes quite clear. If not, well, I’m afraid said doc will simply have to endure a 3am phone call.
I should have clarified. I don’t deal with prescriptions. I deal with records for billing. Sadly, however, there are mistakes that are made, either because the physician wasn’t clear with what was done, or because the diagnosis information isn’t adequate enough for us to be able to bill it out.
My dad, on the other hand, is a pharmacist, and he’s got some horror stories…
I get prescriptions for Schedule II medication … the joys of AD/HD. Anyhow, if there’s just one little thing on the script that is questionable or can’t be interpreted, the pharmacist cannot call the psychiatrist to confirm. Instead, I have to go back to the shrink and get another, more legible prescription.
I get prescriptions for Schedule II medication … the joys of AD/HD. Anyhow, if there’s just one little thing on the script that is questionable or can’t be interpreted, the pharmacist cannot call the psychiatrist to confirm. Instead, I have to go back to the shrink and get another, more legible prescription.
Three of the four doctors I work for do have pretty bad handwriting, but we in the offic have all gotten used to it. It’s true that if you work with someone every day, after a while you become able to fairly easily decipher the wiggly scribbles that comprise their handwriting. I guess that our pharmacists are used to it, too, because we don’t get very many phone calls saying that they can’t figure out what was written. We DO hear about it if there is ANY trouble whatsoever with the scripts, though, so if they can’t read stuff the would let us know instead of puzzling it out. If the doc is not available and it is urgent that the pharmacist know, we will sometimes look in the patient’s chart and see if the doctor has written down what he was ordering. If we at the office can figure out what he’s written (or if it’s been typed) it can save time all around. But that doesn’t happen too frequently. Our guys will gladly clarify if they are asked what the hell they just wrote.
The same people who manage to find some excuse for the MD’s would be highly pissed if their auto was a day late getting out of the shop because the parts man couldn’t read the mechanics order for parts and couldn’t be found to decipher it.
C’mon you docs, clear writing isn’t all that hard for someone who has managed to go through, what is it, 10 years of college level or higher.
its certain abbreviations you have to be worried about on doctors notes, ie:
DFNDFC
(Dont Fucking Know, Dont Fucking Care)
CF bundy
(Completely Fucked BUt Not Dead Yet)
What, you think I spent 4 years of college, 4 years of med school, and 3 years of residency studying freaking penmanship? Clear writing is very hard to do when you’re doing tons of it on top of dozens of other urgent and emergent problems. When one is doing their best writing 60 to 100 communications a day, in the course of a week there will be at least 2 or 3 which are not always clear to everyone and will be held up as examples of “typical doctor writing”! We deal with it as best we can. It’s already been pointed out that objective studies show doctor’s handwriting to be no better or worse than other professionals. Geez, patients already want us to be available to them 24/7, know all the latest medical stuff, including the quackery, never make a mistake, never run late in the office, oh and don’t make too much money either!
I’d better quit here before this becomes pit-worthy.
I’ve seen other discussions on doctors’ handwriting cite gender (most doctors being men) as a factor in contributing to poor handwriting. However, there are women who are doctors, but nothing I have come across has ever looked at how women doctors write compared to other women. Do they write just as poorly as their male doctor counterparts, or is their writing relatively worse? That is, is it less legible than other women’s handwriting, but still better than a male doctor’s handwriting?
As a male myself, my own handwriting would put most doctors to shame. My dad, who is a pharmacist, has atrocious handwriting, just slightly worse than my own. My grandpa, who is 87, can still produce meticulously neat block letters in his writing, so maybe gender isn’t necessarily the reason.
I work for three female ob-gyns and we are constantly telling two of them to quit scribbling. They say its because they are in a rush that the writing is illegible and I tend to agree. They dictate for the charts, and a lot of times the nurses will write out the RXs and they doc just signs it. They can both write fine when they slow down. The third doc has lovely handwriting. SHE says its because of the nuns at her high school:eek:
My Dad claims he had a prof in med school who wrote with his right hand and erased with his left, so he had to learn to write amazingly fast just to get notes. To compound his scribble, he (not to bash anyone here) is a south paw. Not that all south paws write poorly, they just write…different. So to try to decipher a cat scratching that also all leans left, was sometimes impossible. We used to call him at his office to try to figure out what our list of chores said.
He also never says goodbye on the phone, he just hangs up…Dad?? dad? hello? I used to call him back and make him say goodbye.
Just think about it. You are responsible for so much important information being transmitted to another person and you have absolutely no time to do it. Doctors do the best they can - there are some (in my opinion very few) that take shortcuts, but most attempt to at least convey the important stuff. Most pharmacists, nurses, and other medical staff are knowledgeable enough to know what a routine order looks like and when something needs to be clarified. I second QtM’s assertion that the very few orders that are incomprehensible are not the norm. People need to realize how much of a strain this entire system is. It is not just limited to prescription and order writing. That doctor’s are even able to write so many orders that ARE understood is amazing, given the incredible time constraints on them. Unfortunately, the same thing must be said about almost all of the other health related fields. The (American) health system is at a buckling point right now, with so many patients and so few people to address their needs.