The Impact of Live Virtual Medical Scribes on Clinician Performance
What do Live Virtual Medical Scribes and personal assistants have in common? They impact performance. Many clients see IKS Health’s highly trained virtual scribes as trusted personal assistants, and it’s easy to see why. Research shows that adding a Virtual Medical Scribe reduces the burden on clinicians and improves efficiency. Here are a few ways scribe support offers a natural attrition that benefits clinician performance.
1. Live Scribing
Live Scribing services deliver complete medical reports ready for clinician review, edit and sign-off immediately upon the conclusion of the encounter. This enables them to conclude their documentation while everything is still fresh in their minds while simultaneously eliminating the need for afterw-hours charting. Users agree their Live Scribes allow them to leave the office shortly after seeing their last patient, virtually eliminating any pajama time related to documentation.
2. Pre-Charting
Pre-charting is the most obvious tangible time saver for clinicians with a minimum of 30 minutes per day saved with the addition of a virtual scribe with IKS. Any reduction in pajama time helps boost physician wellness by switching the time spent working on notes outside of the clinic to time with their family.
Scribes do the heavy lifting of organizing and documenting notes and creating a patient synopsis. Clinicians simply review to know the patient history and reason for the visit. Less time working after hours and a more effective patient visit results in efficiency gains.
3. Visit Charting
Virtual scribes complete visit charting in real-time while the clinician spends face-to-face time with their patient. Instructions and a follow-up plan are then ready for the clinician at check-out. During the patient visit, scribes can also provide screen sharing and navigation assistance to cut down on the time a clinician must spend searching on the computer.
4. Computerized Clinician Order Entries (CPOE)
While CPOEs are time savers in themselves compared to traditional paper, phone, or fax order methods, scribes save the clinician even more time. Virtual scribes set medications, labs, referrals, and more in “pending” for clinicians to sign off, resulting in quicker turnaround time for medications and more efficient patient care.
5. In-Basket Management
Sorting through an overwhelming number of emails at the end of the day takes time away from a clinician to handle more important tasks or even spending that time at home. Virtual scribes can assist with in-basket tasks, similar to what a medical assistant handles. This keeps clinicians from spending extra hours at the desk but still having access to any needed information.
6. Clinician Efficiency Gains
It can pay to be productive. On average, clinicians see an efficiency gain with the ability to add patients to their daily schedule because they have less documentation burden thanks to having a scribe. Larger academic medical facilities noted an average of 1-2 patients per 4-hour clinic shift using IKS’ Virtual Medical Scribes.
It’s not just seeing more patients that clinicians and patients benefit from – it’s more face-to-face time with those patients that really matters. An article in AMA states that scribes allow clinicians to focus more on listening and talking with patients and less time on the computer. This improves the patient experience and physician satisfaction.
7. Average RVU Improvement Gain
While some clinicians may put off adding a virtual scribe due to cost, it turns out that they can often pay for themselves. Some larger academic medical facilities that IKS partners with see an average Relative Value Unit (RVU) improvement of 12-14% per chart. This natural improvement in RVU is all due to the scribe’s ability to capture more accurate and complete discrete data.
8. Clinician Wellness
Experts agree that the burdensome documentation process of the EHR is a main component to physician burnout. Relieving that burden by using virtual scribes to complete the documentation not only improves clinician wellness but also patient care. Clinicians have more time to spend with patients and increase the number of patients they see in a day. They also spend less after-hours time working on documentation.
9. Clinician/Patient Interaction
It’s difficult to spend meaningful time with patients when burdened by documentation. With virtual scribes handling the administrative burdens, clinicians are free to spend more face-to-face time with patients. The clinician can more easily connect with their patient and gain a clearer understanding of pain to provide better care.
10. Clinician/Staff Interaction
Less time sitting at a computer means more productive time for a clinician, and it’s not just the patients that benefit. Clinicians are made more available to their staff to help with clinic efficiency. A more effective team leads to better collaboration, increased job satisfaction, and better overall patient care.
Scribes relieve clinicians from documentation burden while also forming a more robust medical note. A more complex note with more information increases the potential for justifiable revenue. Find out how IKS can help you reduce physician burnout, increase patient satisfaction, and improve document quality and financial results with industry leading Virtual Medical Scribes.
