The type of scribe employment model may affect the ability of health care organizations to evaluate scribe performance and control scribe service quality scribes may be health care organization employees, or contractors provided by scribe staffing agencies.ĭespite these practice variations and the sensitive role scribes play in patient encounters, relatively little has been published about how the use of scribes may affect patient safety. Depending on the organization, scribes may be unlicensed or licensed personnel they may only provide documentation assistance or also perform clinical duties per preexisting professional qualifications (e.g., medical assistant, licensed practical nurse, clinical technician). There is no standard job description for scribes. As a result, scribes possess varying levels of documentation skills and clinical knowledge. The rapidly growing medical scribe industry is unregulated: certification is not required, nor are there training standards for scribes (although some organizations-primarily scribe service agencies-offer to train and certify scribes ). There are significant practice variations that can affect the quality of scribe work and ultimately patient care ( 4, 5): They also may affect how patients interact with providers. Interposed between a provider and an EHR, a scribe is uniquely positioned to affect not only how and what information is captured, but also how providers think about and seek information during an encounter. Simply by virtue of their presence, scribes-silent though they may be-make the patient encounter more complex. Under pressure to treat more patients while completing time-intensive electronic health record (EHR) documentation, physicians and licensed independent practitioners have increasingly turned to medical scribes for documentation assistance during patient encounters.( 2) In this sense, the use of scribes can be viewed as a workaround or unintended consequence of EHR use.( 3) What safety aspects should health care organizations consider when implementing and evaluating a scribe program? Background Scribes have supported physicians for thousands of years.( 1) However, little is known about how today's use of medical scribes may affect patient safety.
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