The Physician’s Back Office
Contents

The Physician’s Back Office

The paperwork residency never taught you.

I walk through filling out FMLA certifications, disability forms, parking placards and other paperwork that clinicians do. I go through what each section is asking and the common errors that clinicians make filling them out. I am an internal medicine primary care physician. I have experience filling these out myself and I enjoy teaching and sharing what I know.

Kevin Lease, MD·Internal medicine, primary care·Columbia, Missouri

Form WH-380-E · Part BItem 9, time off in flare-ups

How often will flare-ups keep your patient off work, and for how long each time?

As needed

Sent back

No frequency or duration given. HR (Human Resources) returns it.

Same box, answered.

Migraines about twice a month, one to two days each

How often and how long, which is a complete answer. HR has what it needs for this box.

Figure 1. One box from the WH-380-E, the most common form on a physician’s desk. The whole form, box by box: WH-380-E, field by field.
Kevin Lease, MD

Who writes this

I’m a practicing internal medicine primary care physician in Columbia, Missouri. When I started my first primary care job, I was given these forms to complete and I remember struggling to figure out how to do them. Since then, I have seen that other clinicians were sometimes uncertain about how to complete the forms correctly, which definitely adds to the time it takes to complete them, contributing to physician burnout.

This site exists to close that gap in training, so that physicians and other clinicians can spend less of their time on the forms and get their lunch time and evenings back that are being spent doing paperwork.