More than half of physicians are using electronic medical records as federal government spend huge amount of dollar for the transition from paper work to electronic health records. There are many physicians who are struggling to master these new EHR software. In order to boost their productivity, they have started employing medical scribes. This in a way means that physicians have to spend less time in front of computer which means better interaction with patients. Having said that, it’s important to know about the other group of industry experts who believes that using these scribes have obstructed the EHRs development.
INCREASING DEMAND
The scribe business is growing at an increased rate, as stated by FierceEMR. With more and more healthcare practitioners adopting this EHR systems, there is increasing in the demand for scribes to have a relieve from the burden of documentation. This ratio has been increasing with years. According to experts by 2020, there are chance that there will be one scribe for every ten doctors.
American College of Medical was created for providing proper certification and training, keeping the growth of these scribes in mind.
There are hospitals that have implemented programs for scribe in order to mitigate productivity. Indeed EHRs can get complicated for physicians especially to those who are not that tech savvy.
Unintended Effects
Indeed healthcare industry is feeling that using scribe is immensely beneficial for physicians and for practices in short terms, there are some unintended negative consequences resulting from delegating your crucial clinical documentation.
- We all agree that scribes do allow medical practitioners to attend more patients and rising productivity but this also hinders the EHR software development.
- If physicians do not use EHR software, they can’t suggest improvements in the technology. Chances are that if EHR technology is only used by scribes, EHR vendors will never improve on their programs.
- Reducing pressure and market demand may result in undesirable and unintended outcome.
- Cases where physicians allow their scribes to perform all the non documentation tasks, the chances of patient safety decreases. You can hire medical coding and billing company having HIPAA compliance to protect any kind of breach.
According to some people, it will be beneficial for physicians to take out time for identifying errors in the usage of technology and push vendors to make the changes in order to make optimal EHR function. Most people think that it’s better to outsource all the technical work and deliver quality service to the patients.
Indeed technology should be always kept in background to help you have a thriving practice but it’s becoming the crucial point for health care now . Possibly we should relegate to middleware by doing what we can do better and help our economy to thrive.
