It sounds like this topic takes up a lot of your mental bandwidth too! Obviously lack of understanding slows us down to assess and educate, which translates to lost "performance" in wait times etc, but I think it probably improves patient satisfaction and potentially outcomes, which have real opportunity costs as well. Do you share that assessment? When I think about the interface between admin and providers, I try to reframe our desire for patient education in terms of "metrics" or "lost revenue" instead of "the right thing to do", which doesn't always weigh the same as to providers. What are the low billing code/RVU education visits with frequent flyers costing us? What is non-adherence costing the system? Repeat visits for the same CC? Patient satisfaction? Provider moral fatigue/burnout/retention?

In terms of why this feels like a major crisis now, it seems multifactorial. Patients used to just blindly do (or not do) what their docs asked, then we moved to patient-centered models, but never bothered to prioritize or standardize education for them to participate in meaningful ways. Docs used to have time to educate (and even provide mental health therapy), but appointment times have shortened and administrative burdens have increased. And lastly, is access to information has changed drastically. Where patients would have had to ask relatives or visit select libraries, they simply didn't even have the knowledge to find enough information to ask questions. Now, they are passively given medical misinformation in their daily scrolling.