St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Michele Munz has found that some emergency rooms are easing the transition to electronic medical records by hiring “scribes” to enter information into the system, thus freeing up the doctor to focus on the actual patient.
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Munz reports that scribes are often young, well-trained, tech-savvy pre-med types who get $8 to $10 an hour and plenty of real-world clinical observation for their trouble. The use of one California-based company’s scribes has grown sevenfold in the past two years, expansion its CEO called “exponential.”
Munz’ story shows that the growth is driven by the desire to ameliorate productivity hits that many hospitals have faced in the wake of EMR adoption.
After the switch to computer records, emergency departments have reported a loss in productivity. At DePaul, patient wait times initially increased 28 percent and patient satisfaction declined 40 percent despite additional staffing, said Dr. Stephen Larson, director of the hospital’s emergency department. St. John’s Mercy also reported a peak in wait times.
While both hospitals have seen wait times drop as doctors get past the learning curve, the emergency physicians group at DePaul decided to begin the scribe program in December “to allow us to continue to add to our gains,” Larson said.