One answer to EMR data entry: Hire a scribe to do it

Technically Speaking. By Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews staff. July 14, 2008.

The medical scribe industry is poising itself for serious growth in the next few years.

Companies that provide scribes to handle typing and interfacing with an electronic medical record for a physician or staff say the national push for EMR adoption will increase the demand for these services.

The news surprises some EMR vendors, who use as a selling point that a practice can save money by eliminating transcriptionists.

"I don't understand why anyone would [hire a scribe]. That doesn't make sense to me because they'll never get out of the learning curve," said Jack Callahan, the vice president of corporate development for an EMR company that sells to small practices.

Scribe companies, which previously had concentrated on hospitals, say they are finding demand for their services from individual practices.

Here's how it works: The scribe takes notes during the clinical exam and enters them into the appropriate place in the EMR, relieving the doctor of the note-taking and data-entry responsibilities.

The common criticism of medical scribes is that their use adds one more layer of bureaucracy, and keeps physicians from unlocking the potential of their EMRs because they're never interacting with them.

But medical scribe companies counter that they help physicians interact more with patients, because scribes handle the technology.

"If anything, the need for the scribe is validated and necessitated with the implementation of an EMR," said Lindsey Edwards, executive director for Phys-Assist Inc., a medical scribe staffing company in Dallas.