Scribes help doctors eliminate EMR downsides

Do your physicians fret over how their productivity might slow down upon implementing an electronic medical record? Are they worried that the effort to learn the new technology will distract them from patient care? If so, you may want to consider hiring a scribe--an emerging type of medical professional who shadows clinicians and inputs all necessary data into the EMR.

Most do the job part-time as college students and plan to go on to full-time careers in medicine or nursing. Because of the valuable head start offered by the experience, scribes often are willing to work for $8 to $10 an hour with no benefits, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Before adding scribes in November, emergency department doctors at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California used to spend two minutes with a patient, then four minutes typing the information into a computer. Now the doctor talks to the patient with the scribe present and summarizes the encounter to the scribe in 30 seconds. While the scribe spends three minutes entering the information into a laptop, the doctor can spend extra time with the patient. Afterward, the doctor checks the accuracy of the scribe's chart, makes any necessary additions or corrections and signs off.

The cost of hiring scribes may be more than offset by the additional revenue they help capture. Between seeing more patients and optimizing billing, physicians can boost their revenues by $50 to $60 an hour using scribes, whose services typically cost $20 to $26 an hour, said Alex Geesbreght, president of PhysAssist Scribes in Fort Worth.

For physicians who question whether college students are equipped to handle the complicated task of charting patients after only two to four months of training, proponents such as Dr. Michael Murphy, an emergency physician who started Lancaster-based ScribeAmerica in 2003, reassure that, despite the rapidly growing demand for scribes, training programs do not cut corners. "If scribes write something down inaccurately, lives are affected," he said.

To learn more:
- read the full article in the Los Angeles Times

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