3 ms·

The fact that you feel that additional personnel are necessary to document what another person does speaks volumes as to the unnecessary documentation requireme

The 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 ago
How 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 ago
  You'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 ago
I 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.

epmaybe 8y ago

How 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 ago
You'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 ago

I 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.