For Doctors Drowning in Emails, One Health System’s New Strategy: Pay for Replies

These messages might contain medication questions or completely new concerns patients didn’t mention during face-to-face visits. And while the University of California, San Francisco, where Byron practices, has seen volumes surge from a few hundred thousand such emails in 2016 to about two million in 2021, she and other clinicians typically haven’t been paid for answering them.

“It’s become sort of this extra thing that physicians are spending multiple hours a day doing… that starts to weigh on people,” Byron said. That’s why she’s leading a novel experiment at UCSF to let clinicians bill insurers for certain medical correspondence. It’s partly to assuage the burnout caused by all the unpaid tasks on a clinician’s plate. But it’s also intended to give clinicians an incentive to spend chunks of their workday on email, a modality patients are increasingly comfortable with.