Virtual Scribe Vendors Remotely Generate EHR Notes and Coding

The use of scribes to act as intermediaries between a clinician and a patient is now common practice in outpatient healthcare settings (see, for example: Shift of Hospital EMR Data Entry Tasks from MDs to Scribes;The Emergence of EMR Scribes as a New Category of Hospital Employees;The Explosive Growth of EHR Scribes; Back to the Future). This use of scribes relieves the clinician of the laborious responsibility of entering data into the EHR. The clinician only interacts with the patient and the scribe extracts the necessary and appropriate EHR information from the conversation without any cues from the clinician. Disadvantages of the use of scribes is that they add to the expense of patient visits and are also expensive to recruit and train. Another scribe option is now available -- virtual scribe services (see:How a scribe tool linked to Epic EHR is helping ease physician burnout). Below is an excerpt from an article on this topic:Chief among those administrative burdens [ cited by physicians and leading to burnout] was documenting in the electronic health record. Many physicians were spending two hours or more after each clinical session documenting in the EHR.As a result, they were missing family events and staying up late at night typing clinical notes. And in the office, they were too burdened to add new patients to their panels or focus on improving care and outcomes of their existing patients....[Massachusetts General Hospital] already had a relations...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Cost of Healthcare Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Delivery Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Quality of Care Source Type: blogs