Health System Tests Paying Practitioners for Emailing Patients

February 18, 2022

Many doctors spend hours reading patient emails every day and are rarely compensated for this valuable service. To incentivize patient-clinician communication and reduce provider burnout, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is testing a program that lets providers charge insurers for their efforts. This program was spurred, in part, by a recent boom in patient email correspondence.

According to Mohana Ravindranath of STAT News, “If it’s successful, UCSF’s initiative could serve as a roadmap for other health systems eager to compensate clinicians for the time they spend on virtual communication. But it’s also led to a larger debate about the downstream effects of new billing categories, which could create more administrative burden, irk patients who are hit with unexpected co-pays, and move further away from payments rewarding the quality, and not the volume, of health services.”