The medical scribe industry is booming, as listeners of American Public Media’s “Marketplace” heard Tuesday.
“In the past year alone we have tripled our growth to probably just under 7,500 employees in 47 states,” Sarah Lamb, chief operations officer of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based medical scribe company Scribe America, said in the report, filed by Miles Bryan of Wyoming Public Radio.
Trade group the American College of Medical Scribe Specialists forecast that the scribe workforce will quintuple from 20,000 today to 100,000 in 2020, according to the story. “Unless we have some futuristic component where a physician can do live documentation while walking down the hall, there will always be a need for scribes,” said Lamb.
Fueling the demand is the complexity of electronic medical records. “These records are way more comprehensive than the paper files or computer spreadsheets the hospital used to use,” Bryan explained, then shared interviews he did with a scribe and an emergency physician at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center in Wyoming.
Dr. Amy Tortorich sees about 30 patients per day in the emergency department, and it takes about 10 minutes to document each encounter. “That’s an extra five hours charting. So half my shift, almost half my shift,” she said.
With this kind of time requirement, it is well worth the $13 an hour that lead ED scribe Tyrell Kirchhefer makes as he works toward his goal of getting into medical school, Tortorich said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
However, Dr. George Gellert, medical informatics officer at Christus Health, Irving, Texas, argued that the medical scribe industry actually is standing in the way of progress by giving EMR developers a disincentive to improve the documentation functionality of their products. Gellert explained his viewpoint in a recent commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Take a listen, and try not to cringe when “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal misleadingly states that the move toward EMRs was “in part because of the Affordable Care Act.”
It’s called the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, Mr. Ryssdal. It was part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a year before the Affordable Care Act came to be.
