Takeaway
While time consuming, the forms clinicians complete to help patients can improve their lives more than we might expect. Consider mentally reframing forms-completion as an act of patient advocacy.
Passion in the medical profession | June 2, 2026 | 3 min read
By Jane Abernethy, MD, MBE & Sarah Syed, MD, Johns Hopkins Medicine
A few years ago, one of my patients arrived at the clinic carrying a stack of workers’ compensation forms thick enough to change the rhythm of the day. Admittedly, I sighed before we even started.
I felt frustrated with the impossible arithmetic of modern outpatient medicine. The forms appeared at the end of a clinic session already crowded with critical medications stalled by prior authorizations, uncontrolled blood pressure that needed close follow-up, grief I wanted to check in on a week later, housing insecurity requiring coordination with social work, and all the emotional and administrative labor that continues long after the last patient leaves a primary care clinic. In total, completing her forms carefully took nearly an hour. I wondered whether any of it would matter as much as she hoped it would.
The paperwork that changed everything
This year she returned to tell me what happened next. After years of appeals and ongoing documentation, she was awarded more than $300,000 related to the injury. She said she wanted to use it to open an outpatient substance use treatment center in the neighborhood where she grew up.
The ordinary work of advocacy
In medicine, we often talk about advocacy as something grand—marching at the Capitol, publishing op-eds, and changing policy—but some of the most meaningful advocacy we do for an individual patient appears painfully ordinary. It lives in disability paperwork, housing forms, utility shutoff protections, FMLA documents, transportation applications, and workers’ compensation claims.
My initial frustration wasn’t unfounded—this work is genuinely complex. It often demands a certainty about exact timelines and fixed prognoses that medicine can’t honestly provide. Bodies don’t heal on a schedule, and lives don’t pause for an insurer’s deadline. Still, patients are forced to translate suffering into boxes and checkmarks, and we’re asked to observe it and sign our names.
A system that doesn’t value this work
Our healthcare system largely treats this challenging work as peripheral rather than central. We squeeze it into lunch breaks and evenings, completing legally consequential documentation in fragments of uncompensated time. Yet these forms can have a meaningful impact and deserve care and attention. Patients deserve clinicians who can complete them thoroughly and truthfully, and providers deserve workflows and compensation structures that recognize this work for what it is—patient care.
Because sometimes a form isn’t merely paperwork. Sometimes it’s the bridge between injury and stability, between illness and survival. Like for my patient, sometimes it helps carry one person toward healing while opening the possibility of healing for others too.
Small acts of witness
I still don’t enjoy filling out forms. I suspect most primary care clinicians don’t. But I try to no longer think of them as empty bureaucracy. I try to think of them as small acts of witness where I translate my patient’s suffering into language that institutions will recognize. And every so often, buried within all the tedious bureaucracy can be unexpectedly powerful dignity, restitution, healing, and even the possibility of reinvention.
Five practical tips to make the “forms” of advocacy more sustainable:
1. Create a patient “forms visit” option.
When feasible, schedule a separate in-person or telehealth visit for high stakes paperwork to ensure accuracy, have protected time for thoughtful completion, and appropriately recognize the work involved.
2. Anchor to objective data.
Tie restrictions to exam findings, imaging/labs, treatment plan, and observed function when possible.
3. Set boundaries and timelines upfront.
Tell patients how long forms typically take, what you can’t ethically certify, and a realistic turnaround window.
4. Share the workload.
Ask staff to prefill demographics, dates, job duties, and claim numbers, route forms through a single inbox, and track them like any other clinical task.
5. Celebrate your wins.
When a prior authorization goes through, benefits are approved, or a patient gets protected time to heal, pause, and name it. This work is easy to dismiss as “just paperwork,” but these outcomes are real patient care, and noticing them can be sustaining.
This piece expresses the views solely of the author. It does not necessarily represent the views of any organization, including Johns Hopkins Medicine.