Practice Management Alert

Scribes can help you increase productivity and connect with patients.

Every medical professional wants to achieve that magical sweet spot: seeing as many patients as possible without sacrificing quality of care. But how is it possible to balance those seemingly contradictory aims? Scribes offer one solution.

A scribe takes the task of charting out of the physician’s hands, allowing the doctor to focus much more fully on the patient. The scribe either follows a single physician or stays in a single exam room, writing down each patient’s medical history and documenting the proceedings of the appointment, as well as any treatment decisions that come out of it.

Good Reasons to Add a Scribe

No longer does the physician have to toggle back and forth between paying attention to the patient and keeping a detailed written record; instead, the scribe takes on all the record keeping, reducing wasted time and strengthening the connection between physician and patient. The physician never has to turn away from their patient or break focus.

Thanks to the promise of higher revenue and improved patient care scribes offer, industry leader ScribeAmerica sees a booming demand for their services; they estimate that there may be as many as 100,000 scribes working in this country by 2020.

Scribes can offer much more thorough and accurate documentation than a physician could alone. “Because a scribe’s job is documentation, the legibility of charts and the accuracy of coding tend to be better, resulting in both faster and higher reimbursements,” optometrist Brian Spittle wrote in Optometric Management.

You’ll fit in more patients. Scribes also guarantee higher productivity, because they shorten each appointment. The exam is continuous, with no need for the physician to stop and write as they go. Shorter appointments mean more appointments per day, resulting in more revenue. “We had a four month backlog for seeing a cardiologist,” Phoenix Heart CEO Kyle Matthews told Physicians Practice. “We added a scribe and he added four slots a day.”

With the shift to electronic health records, having a scribe with data entry experience can be invaluable. A physician who has less facility with computers might struggle to complete these forms as quickly or as accurately as a capable scribe.

Consider These Scribe Downsides

One potential drawback is that a good scribe can be hard to find, and not cheap to hire. Scribes must have skills across many different departments, and above-average knowledge of computer software. That skill set restricts the hiring pool, and requires a minimum starting salary of $30,000 a year.

Another disadvantage is the lack of standards or oversight for scribes. Beyond a voluntary certification, there is no agreed-upon training regimen to guarantee that a scribe knows their stuff. “This is literally an exploding industry, filling a perceived gap, but there is no regulation or oversight at all,” said George Gellert, regional chief medical informatics officer at Christus Santa Rosa Health System in San Antonio, to Kaiser Health News.

Some patients might also be uncomfortable with having a stranger in the exam room, leading them to withhold important information from their doctor.