'Useless' appointments for insurance paperwork a waste of their time, say Quebec doctors

Family doctors in Quebec say they spend too much time filling out paperwork for insurance companies and it takes away from the time they spend caring for patients.

Pascal Renaud, the president of the Association des Médecins Omnipraticiens de Québec (AMOQ), says each day patients attend doctors' appointments just to have forms filled out for their insurance companies.

It takes up nearly a quarter of his workday, he said.

"It's two hours a day of work, all the paperwork," he said. "That's two hours we're not seeing other patients."

Many of his patients need referrals for other appointments — things like massage therapy, physiotherapy, and psychotherapy — so their insurance will cover them. 

"These are useless visits," Renaud said. "As doctors, we want to see the sickest patients and help them, rather than fill out administrative forms for insurance companies."

Mathieu Isabel, a family physician based in Montreal, said a medical referral for massage therapy or other forms of paramedical treatment often wastes doctors' time and shouldn't be required. 

"The issue is when there are numerous requests to fill out repetitive forms that are extremely tedious for things that are not entirely medically necessary," he said. "On the day-to-day level, we keep seeing these requests from patients."

Lyne Duhaime, the Quebec president of the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association, which represents private insurers, said many insurers do not require doctor's notes for such services. 

She said the best practice is for a group insurance plan not to require referrals from doctors for paramedical appointments. Many insurance plans, however, do require them, mainly to manage costs, Duhaime said. 

Duhaime said insurers are ready to standardize their forms to make it easier for doctors to fill them out, but they need the assistance of the Quebec government to do so.

Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé said Quebec's 2024 budget allocated $902.5 million over five years to update the health-care system's antiquated information technology.

"We're looking into the insurance issue," he said. "It's going to be very important because there's a lot of insurance paperwork."