The financial advantages of medical scribes extend beyond increased visits
Employing medical scribes can boost revenue for a practice, the authors show, well beyond being an opportunity to expand patient volume.
The 14 scribes worked with 17 physician and nurse practitioner PCPs beginning in July 2018. Participation by PCPs was voluntary; they received no compensation for participating in the scribe program. PCPs were not required to see additional patients to participate. PCPs who chose to work with a scribe were similar to those who declined a scribe, as regards gender, race, type of provider (MD or NP), tenure at the institution, and percentage of time in clinical work (see Table W-1).
The control group comprised providers who elected not to work with a scribe but who worked in the same clinics as the intervention providers.
Scribes were assigned to a PCP based on availability during the PCP’s scheduled hours and worked with 1 PCP throughout the intervention (except for 1 PCP who worked with 2 scribes). All PCPs worked with their scribe(s) part time; on average, 49% of intervention PCPs’ visits were scribed.
Inclusion and exclusion criteria
Because the first year at an institution is a learning period for PCPs, we excluded those who worked at the institution for < 1 year before the start of the scribe program (n = 12). Based on the extensive clinical experience of 1 PCP (WA) with scribes, we excluded the first 200 visits or 6 weeks (whichever occurred first) with a scribe among all scribed providers, to account for an initial learning period (n = 2202, of 15,372 scribed visits [14%]). We also excluded 2 providers who left during the pre-intervention period or were in the intervention period for < 1 month.
To ensure that we captured visits to providers with clinically significant exposure to scribes, we required scribed providers to have ≥ 20% of their visits scribed during the intervention period. To minimize the potential for contamination, we excluded nonscribed visits to scribed providers during the intervention period (n = 2211), because such nonscribed visits were largely due to visits outside the scribe’s scheduled time.
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