New opportunities are opening up for administrative assistants and other office support staff in, of all things, healthcare.
Hospitals and clinics, and increasingly now that electronic medical records are becoming required, doctor’s offices are employing medical scribes. The use of medical scribes has boomed in just the last several years, and every indication is that scribe jobs will continue to be among the fastest growing healthcare occupation.
Medical scribes are silent recorders of doctor-patient interactions, documenting the discussion, the diagnosis, treatment plan and, later, after the records have been reviewed and approved by the doctor, entering the billing code. Many scribes also perform other duties, some of them more clerical such as scheduling patient visits.
Historically, these jobs have been filled by medical students or upper-level undergraduates in health or medical programs. With the demand now outstripping the supply, scribes with training in other areas are finding work.
Requirements typically now include some college, English proficiency, good listening skills, administrative or clerical experience, and a willingness to learn medical terminology and the arcane coding and billing of medical procedures. Training, however, is required; some companies provide it and even pay a salary during a residency period.
How great is the demand? The first scribe staffing company, PhysAssist in Forth Worth, Texas, had 35 scribes in 2008. Today it has 1,400.
Pay for scribes ranges up to about $25 for the most experienced and knowledgeable professionals. The average is closer to about $17 an hour.
The growth is driven by the federal mandate that all medical records be digitized. Offices and facilities that fail to make the switch to computerized records face the reduction or loss of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act included significant financial incentives for making the switch.
Further prompting came from the looming implementation of ICD-10, an illness and injury classification system that will increase the current 13,000 or so codes (also used for billing) by a factor of 10 when both the ICD-10 CM and ICD-10 PCS are included. (The former has about 68,000 codes for clinical diagnoses, while the latter, though separate, is an expansion of the ICD-10 CM that codes for procedures.)
In a move opposed by even the American Medical Association, Congress has pushed the required implementation from October to October 1, 2015. The AMA’s opposition is less about delaying than killing the adoption of the ICD-10 coding altogether.
By shifting the paperwork burden to scribes, physicians are able to increase the number of patients they see, without sacrificing the time they spend with each.
In a blog post for The Wall Street Journal Dr. Allan Bank cited a study his clinic did that found having a scribe increased doctor productivity by 50%.
Bank, director of research at the United Heart & Vascular Clinic of Allina Health in St. Paul and an associate professor of cardiology at the University of Minnesota, noted, “Although the time spent in each patient’s room was reduced by about 30%, the time in direct interaction with the patient (e.g., without the computer for entering patient information) increased significantly, and an independent assessment of physician-patient interaction was judged improved.”