There are several ways to calculate the cost of a medical scribe. First, how will the scribe learn to scribe for your organization? Most scribes learn to scribe by looking over the shoulder of your staff for a month or more. In most cases, this shadowing takes 30-60 days before they can truly begin to learn to document themselves.
As you may have guessed not all medical scribes are created equal, so let’s distinguish the differences in the marketplace today. The first thing that most people do not always realize is when they talk medical scribe it is very loose term. Most Medical Scribes have no to very little medical experience, from days to a couple weeks.
In the recent KLAS report, the author discussed how healthcare organizations are leveraging virtual medical scribes to improve clinician satisfaction. The KLAS report described virtual medical scribes as remote human scribes who communicate with cognition via laptop, smartphone, or tablet. The virtual medical scribe’s duties include: updating charges, clarifying information, entering clinical notes, and making suggestions to physicians.
In a recent article by JAMA, the most significant source of dissatisfaction was physician’s feeling burnt-out by the amount of documentation they have to manually enter in the electronic health record. Doctors and nurses increasingly feel like they are data entry clerks. Entering or confirming average values for every patient is tiring and time-consuming. This takes the doctor away from why they became a doctor in the first place, patient care.
On an average day, a physician spends two or more hours a day documenting in their EMR, and often into the evening, affecting their quality of life and creating physician burnout. These physicians and nurses are looking for some relief from the burden of documentation.