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So I'm a medical student, as you can probably tell from my comment history. I once helped write a proposal for the American Medical Association related to medic
by epmaybe 8y ago
So I'm a medical student, as you can probably tell from my comment history. I once helped write a proposal for the American Medical Association related to medical scribes - individuals that record all the data from physicians into the EHR. The idea for these scribes were to allow physicians to focus on the patient care aspect rather than the documentation and billing.
Our proposal was approved almost unanimously by the student section of the meeting, but was argued extensively by the physician section, not on the proposals actual merit, but on the usefulness or lack thereof of scribes. Some delegates thought that they led to errors in documentation (our proposal was to study this), others thought they would be leapfrogged by newer technologies and thus unnecessary.
Long story short, I have two comments. The first, that having more scribes would be beneficial in letting doctors being doctors, perhaps being a simple solution to the problems demonstrated in the article.
The second is that doctors from all kinds of specialties probably agree on many issues affecting patient care and physicians at large. However, all I see are disagreements.
- assblaster 8y agoThe fact that you feel that additional personnel are necessary to document what another person does speaks volumes as to the unnecessary documentation requirements. We should pare back documentation requirements so that one person can do it without another person's help.
- epmaybe 8y agoHow is it any different than being a client of an accountant or lawyer? Or being an assistant to an executive? Regardless, looking at the present, in my opinion having scribes available would provide a simple solution to a problem often bemoaned in medicine.
- assblaster 8y agoYou're confusing mid-level practitioners with scribes. Lawyers have paralegals. Physicians have PAs or NPs. The existence of someone whose sole job is just following a clinician and documenting for them is absurd. Medicine in the past was fine with paper charts. Sure there was some inefficiency with collecting information. Medicine these days is actually less complex than in the past because answers are more readily available with diagnostic testing. Why is more documentation required today compared to the past? We should all strive to simplify medicine, not facilitate ever increasing unnecessary complexity.
- Nasrudith 8y agoI don't see how that follows - especially given the point of documentation is for spotting errors and preventing malpractice. While much of the medical documentation is overly bureaucratic and poorly designed especially when billing and codes are involved it is completely possible that work could be assisted by a note-taker. Especially when their job is to make it readily understandable to those outside of the immediate context. Not to mention that the notes are pertinent to goals other than patient treatment. A mechanic might replace every known bad part and could handle it himself by just noting the inventory changes but that would be discarding much of the engineering useful data like how the commonly worn out parts were damaged. Anyway my personal opinion of the medical data systems are that they aren't unnecessary but awkward and poorly designed - perhaps due to having to serve too many disparate goals and having very complex systems to track in the first place. I could see adaptive data charts and interfaces being useful in that context. A patient with one leg would have now irrelevant fields fields autofilled as "N/A - amputated" or similarly in their relevant contexts.
- pg_bot 8y agoI co-own a medical clinic and would love to talk with you about how we solve efficiency problems in our practice. (scribes are too slow/expensive) My email is in my profile.