

Scribes could be personnel who function solely as scribes (e.g., “documentation specialists”), but they could also be team members, like medical assistants, who take on scribing as an extension of their existing duties. The aim of medical scribing is to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes by adding a care worker to the healthcare team to document patient-provider encounters in the electronic medical record under clinician supervision. Medical scribing and its burgeoning infrastructure in the United States – scribing companies, training and certifying organizations, advocacy groups – comprise an industry with a predicted 100,000 practicing scribes by 2020.
#Team health medical scribe pay professional#
Our research suggests that individuals will notice different benefits to scribing based on their professional expectations and organizational roles related to documenting patient visits. Scribing, in practice, created opportunities for interpersonal connection. Scribing, as a skill, forged moments of interprofessional fit. Based on our findings, we suggest that a scribing practice emphasizes the complementarity of existing professional roles, which thus leverage the interactional possibilities already present in the primary care team. Through illustrating the slow accumulation of interactions and knowledge that fostered cautious momentum of teams working to normalize scribing practice in VHA primary care clinics, we show how the practice had 1) an organizing effect, as it centered a shared goal (the creation of the note) between the provider, scribe, and patient, and 2) a generative effect, as it facilitated care workers developing relationships that were both interpersonally and inter-professionally valuable.

Initial matrix analysis based on categories outlined in the evaluation plan informed subsequent deductive coding using the social-shaping theory Normalization Process Theory. This manuscript only reports on semi-structured interview data collected from providers and scribes.

MethodsĪt three to six months after medical scribing was introduced, we used semi-structured interviews and direct observations during site visits to five sites to describe the intervention, understand if the intervention was implemented as planned, and to record the experience of the teams who implemented the intervention.

The aim of our study was to understand barriers and facilitators to implementing a scribing practice in primary care. The purpose of this study was to perform an ethnographic process evaluation of an innovative medical scribing practice with primary care teams in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) clinics across the United States. Though much is known about the benefits attributed to medical scribes documenting patient visits (e.g., reducing documentation time for the provider, increasing patient-care time, expanding the roles of licensed and non-licensed personnel), little attention has been paid to how care workers enact scribing as a part of their existing practice.
