Administration Bloat in the Emergency Department Has a Price
The tension between administration and patient care in American healthcare can be clearly seen in the emergency department. Emergency-room nurses work at the front line of a system that must be ready for anything, yet many increasingly find themselves working within layers of administrative requirements that have little to do with actually caring for patients. The problem is not that hospitals need administrators. It's how many. Effective leadership, scheduling, finance, quality improvement and regulatory oversight are essential. However, when the entire healthcare system depends on profit maximizing insurance companies, the exponential growth of administrative work has become disproportionate to the resources available for bedside nursing. A distinction matters. Administrative “bloat” is often used to describe unnecessary management positions, excessive bureaucracy and organizational layers. But administrative burden also comes from insurers, prior-authorization requir...