If the rise of this industry is directly predicated on suboptimal EHRs, he worries that the more established and widespread it becomes, the less incentive vendors will have to innovate and improve their products.

'It's very troubling to us that we are interjecting a third-party individual, with minimal education and minimal training, into a sacred and risky clinical process that is rife with potential error of omission or commission, without much in the way of background training or regulation,' said Webster.īut Gellert has another reason for strong opposition to scribes. Often their 'orientation and training very brief,' he said.Ĭompared to doctors and nurses, most scribes have 'extremely finite or no clinical experience,' said Gellert. While each company sets its own hiring and training criteria, the most basic requirement for scribes is a high school diploma or GED. Those who use scribes to help share the burden of data entry report workflow improvements, productivity gains, increases in patient satisfaction scores and better profit margins.īut the safety risks are easy to see, said Webster. No question, meaningful use has caused docs to have to spend much more time with their EHRs. 'Understandably, physicians are looking for release.' 'Dissatisfaction with EHRs has been immense,' added Gellert. Why the explosive growth in this unregulated industry? “It's a reaction,” said Webster, 'to what most of us as clinicians see as inadequate usability' of EHRs.įrom that perspective, he said, he understood the desire of physicians to get help with the voluminous documentation that many say has turned them from 'clinicians into clerks.' Within six years, they said, there will be one scribe for every seven physicians in the U.S. That number is doubling annually, with more than 20,000 expected this year. A tally in 2014 estimated that 10,000 scribes were working in the U.S. Luke Webster, MD, system CMIO at CHRISTUS Health, and his colleague, George Gellert, MD, associate system CMIO. More than 20 companies provide scribe services in 44 states, according to data provided by S. The scribe industry has grown quickly since HITECH Act spurred massive EHR adoption. Scribes are unlicensed individuals hired and trained to enter clinical information into EHRs at the direction of physician. That's an unwelcome development for two big reasons, said two chief medical information officers at HIMSS16 on Wednesday: patient safety and EHR usability. LAS VEGAS – As electronic health records have proliferated in recent years, so has the use of medical scribes.

Virtual scribe