Wednesday, January 29, 2014

scribes have entered the scene in hundreds of clinics and emergency rooms - NYTimes.com

A Busy Doctor’s Right Hand, Ever Ready to Type - NYTimes.com: Without much fanfare or planning, scribes have entered the scene in hundreds of clinics and emergency rooms. Physicians who use them say they feel liberated from the constant note-taking that modern electronic health records systems demand.








 A study

published jointly in October by the American Medical Association and

RAND Corporation found that electronic health records were a major

contributor to physician dissatisfaction, as doctors negotiate a cranky

truce between talking to and examining the patient, and the ceaseless

demands of the computer. And a recent article

in the journal Health Affairs concluded that two-thirds of a primary

care physician’s day was spent on clerical work that could be done by

someone else; among the recommended solutions was the hiring of scribes