Simple Science: Busy Doctors Make Less Money for Their Hospital

This post is the first in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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Being sick can cause you to spend a lot of money on the doctor and the hospital. The money you spend is not completely set by how sick you are. When your doctor is not tired, you may need to spend more money than if your doctor is tired. A tired doctor often writes less. When a doctor writes more, you often must spend more. This is because the stuff that a doctor writes is used to figure out how much you must spend. If doctors look at the stuff they did when they were tired at a time at which they are not tired, their hospitals may make more money. So, when a doctor has a lot of work, the hospital may get less money from each person that the doctor sees that day.

- Adam Powell, Ph.D.
President, Payer+Provider Syndicate

This is based on Dr. Powell's article, Physician Workload and Hospital Reimbursement: Overworked Physicians Generate Less Revenue per Patient.