As a person that used to be a “human scribe” but for emergency dept doctors. I would say the ER doctors shared the same experience as the one depicted in the news story. For a doctor that was nearing the age of retirement or had very poor keyboard proficiency. scribes were a godsend. Doctors worried less about documentation and focused more on patient care. Of course they still wrote things like admission orders, pre…
>> Documenting it so that it can be billed appropriately is also crucial. This is literally the only reason why scribes, or pretty much any EMR exist. EMRs are an accounting tool. To avoid "down coding" and legal exposure . Plain and simple. There's a reason that doctors would not adopt EMRs for the longest time (at least in the US, don't know other nations) until actual legislation was passed to force them to do so,…
I remember the bean counters from the hospital going over with scribes and doctors on how to “properly” document all the necessary elements to bill for a procedure. All of it was very very boring.
“We can bill for ED physician prelim reads of radiology studies but it needs to have at least 3 or more findings documented. “
So let’s say a an ed physician orders a chest xray to r/o pneumonia vs bronchitis. Have to document in chart something like: “3 view chest xray; no infiltrates, no pleural effusion, no pneumothorax; received by X doctor”
In reality, most doctors would just put “reviewed 3v cxr, no infiltrates”. No need to document negative findings that contribute nothing.
Prior to EMRs, hand written notes and charts were absolutely god awful to read. Physician and nurse short hand is not standardized. Plus some doctors handwriting is just atrocious.
EMRs helped standardize communication between multiple parties (both medical and non-medical). Like others have mentioned, it could have been a way to track standards of care across multiple hospitals or across the US. Unfortunately with the gold rush to get a product out there, all we got was 9-10 different proprietary EMR systems that do not have interoperability.
CT scan performed in Virginia and needs to get reviewed by doctor in California? The hardcopy of the images uses some proprietary viewer that is only accessible within the same system the Virginia hospital used. I remember a few cases of this when we had transfers from out of state. Either hospital physician gets their own additional scan and official read or waits for physical images from other hospital to view. I think in a CT this can be hundreds of images/slices. (Don’t quote me on this, this was a decade ago lol)