An ER doctor wanted help documenting patient care, so she started a scribe business.
Kathleen Myers, MD started Scribes Stat in 2011. In 2012, customers started asking for help in converting to electronic medical records and that created a new clinical informatics business to support that health IT work. Earlier this year, the two companies merged into Essia Health. The company has been hiring new people and growing ever since.
Matthew J. Kirchner joined the company earlier this year as president and chief executive officer.
Kirchner said that the decision to merge the two companies was a result of two trends converging: an increase in the demand for scribes and the growing EHR momentum.
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“Scribes are a way to help docs practice at the top of their license and with our EMR support, we can help hospitals optimize their HIT investment,” he said.
He said that scribes tend to work in specialized practices, such as urology podiatry, ENT, and general surgery.
“You hear so many stories about docs completing patient charts days later, or on weekends on their own time,” he said. “The reality is trying to recall a patient from a Wednesday to a Saturday is a really challenging thing.”
He said that when hiring scribes, Essia looks for people who want to be in medicine in some capacity.
“They come in with undergrad experience in sciences and premed, we screen them for computer savvy and typing skills,” he said. “We train them and take a competent and quick fast processing individual and we teach them to scribe.”
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Kirchner predicts that this physician extender role is just version 1.0 for scribes.
“Within the next 10 years, they will be even more central because they will be doing even more things that will make them indispensible to the care team,” he said.
Essia supports more than 10 EHR platforms and has done more than 100 go lives with hospitals, clinics and physician offices. The company recently completed its 25th hospital EMR go-live with Providence Health & Services. Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, CA, implemented Epic as part of a system-wide rollout.
Kirchner said that Essia’s ongoing EHR support helps hospital systems with three challenges that come with a new EHR system. The first is managing the learning curve for doctors and nurses and filling the gap between rolling out and using a new system. Essia also makes sure that the people helping with the initial rollout have good customer service skills.
“We also take some of the pressure off the help desk at EMR company by answering lots of basic user questions,” he said. “Finally, when you are finished with the rollout, you are not really finished. There are always upgrades, adding new users, ongoing tasks like that.”
Before joining Essia Health, Kirchner worked for Medtronic, Amgen, Johnson & Johnson, Lehman Brothers and Campbell Alliance. At Medtronic, he was responsible for the commercial half of the Connected Care and Care Link platforms. The latter was used with doctors and diabetes patients to help people manage their own care.
Myers is chief medical officer and will continue to serve on the board of directors. She oversees the quality of Essia Health’s programs, including ongoing training and education.
