Over the past decades, physicians have tended to multitask between administrative, clerical, and documentation while attending to patients’ needs.
It steals up most of their time and can only accommodate a handful of patients daily.
With the help of digitalization, virtual medical scribes help physicians save up their time to attend to more patients.
What is a Virtual Medical Scribe?
Currently, doctors are more inclined to hire virtual scribes due to their minimal price tag than their traditional counterparts in-person scribes to remove administrative tasks from their daily operational plates.
Remote medical scribes listen to conversations between patients and doctors in their examination room through phone, recording, or video conferencing tools such as Microsoft Teams.
Definition and role of a virtual medical scribe
Physicians can now free up their time and attend to their patient’s needs by working closely with a virtual medical scribe.
Virtual medical scribes spend most of their shift listening to patient encounters via phone calls, video recordings, or video conferencing.
Through this process, patients become more at ease and have more sense of privacy.
Since patients are calm and relaxed, they can freely express and accurately describe their health condition to the attending physician.
Positive Feedback and Stories of Satisfaction
Benefits of virtual medical scribe services
A smaller price tag than a traditional scribe
From a financial standpoint, a remote medical scribe frees up some operational expenses such as setting up a physical office, transportation and food allowance, office equipment and storage, and other employee benefits and perks.
Increased flexibility and scalability for medical practices
One of the greatest impacts these healthcare professionals provide is their availability and readiness for work so you can easily scale up your services to patients.
They are also easily scalable as you don’t have to sign a long-term contract for them to start working.
A remote medical scribe can work on an hourly and contractual basis.
Improved patient satisfaction and loyalty
Since patients are now heard and cared for, you can expect that the patient will spread the word about the medical practice service and create loyalty.
However, this patient-physician loyalty can only be achieved by creating a safe space for the patients to be at ease and comfortable sharing their medical condition.
The Importance of Efficient Patient Care
Efficient patient care can only be achieved by having a meaningful conversation between a patient and the attending physician.
But whenever a doctor is glued to their computer screen because of documentation tasks the patient may be aloof in giving the full extent of their current medical condition.
Challenges in Traditional Medical Documentation
Since an in-house scribe tends to multitask between assisting the physicians and listening to the patient, they could miss visual and verbal cues from the patient, making it difficult to document their condition.
The risk of incomplete or inaccurate documentation
Working in a fast-paced and highly stressful environment can lead to errors in documentation of a patient’s health condition.
Since they are in a rush and multitasking, physicians can expect errors and inaccuracies in the patient’s medical case.
Traditional medical scribes offer a more expensive price tag
The cons of having a traditional medical scribe working closely with your physicians is that they are employees of your business, so you have to offer competitive employee benefits and packages.
Since they work in-house, they usually have a higher price tag when you hire them due to salary benefits, allowances, and other employee perks.
Working with a live scribe requires creating a physical office and a working desk to accommodate every patient visit.
Impact on patient experience and care and physician satisfaction
Improper and inaccurate documentation often leads to decreased patient satisfaction and physician burnout.
Virtual medical scribes can help increase patient satisfaction and physician satisfaction by reducing administrative burdens.
Aside from reducing their workload, physicians can also build a better impression of their patients as they no longer need to rush their patient consultations.
How Virtual Scribes Can Help
In the medical field, working with a medical scribe has different levels of experience depending on the practice being offered by the doctor.
Medical scribes spend most of their time capturing the patient’s progress in real-time documentation.
Increased perception of privacy
Patients feel uncomfortable sharing their medical conditions when they see a third eye and ears in the exam room.
Since a virtual medical scribe listens to a patient’s progress remotely, the patient and doctors can easily go to the exam room.
This then helps the precise EHR documentation process as the patient comfortably shares their current medical condition.
Reduced functional creep and training time
When you onboard virtual medical scribes to your clinical or medical practice, expect they are highly trained and won’t require a long onboarding period.
Reduced functional creep means that virtual scribes are less likely to be asked to complete increasingly complex EHR tasks.
When an on-site scribe goes beyond the scope of work and executes a complex medical duty, physicians can be at risk for medical malpractice.
That’s why virtual medical scribe services limit their access to their virtual scribe to prevent such a case from happening.
Flexibility of service and improved work-life balance
The services being offered by virtual scribes are not only suitable for medical practices in the cities but also expand to rural areas.
Since these organizations operate on a larger scale, they can provide 24/7 coverage to your clinical and medical practice, allowing you to hear your patients’ medical concerns.
This will foster a healthy work-life balance for your attending physicians and give them time for personal activities after the end of their shift.
Due to their large number of employees working with virtual medical scribes services, they can also cover your medical practice whenever there is a shortage of in-house staff.
Streamlining Efficiency with Virtual Medical Scribe Services
Virtual scribes lessen the workload of doctors by removing the clerical and documentation on their plates.
This will then free up their time and allot more time providing quality care and service to their patient.
Improved medical documentation and accuracy
The accuracy and completeness of medical documentation are critical in creating a proper diagnosis and treatment.
Virtual scribes will note each patient’s visit, follow-up check-ups, list of medications, and medical condition progress.
Increased focus on patient experience, care, and relationships
A healthy relationship between patients and physicians increases patient’s loyalty to your clinic.
When you foster this relationship, your pre-existing patients will treat your clinical practice as their go-to place whenever they are sick, and they can even refer you to their loved ones.
Patients will only return to your clinic when they feel valued and taken care of; without that, there will be no loyalty bond.
Scribes who undergo specialty training can also increase the quality of services being provided by physicians.
Boosted productivity and reduced administrative burden
If you go around today in medical facilities, you’ll definitely hear that most healthcare providers are experiencing stress and burnout.
With the help and support of virtual medical scribes, they can focus on doing the tasks they are good at, which is treating patients with their medical needs.
Overcoming Challenges in Virtual Scribe Implementation
Addressing security risks and telemedicine threats
Since your virtual scribe works remotely, they are more at risk and prone to data privacy incidents.
This means that when you onboard a virtual medical scribe, they must adhere to HIPAA’s strict guidelines and regulations in transmitting patient data.
So, they must be trained to handle sensitive patient data, all their documents and tools must be encrypted, and password-sharing is not allowed within the company.
In line with this, your onsite staff also needs extensive training on using VPN to handle and protect each patient’s sensitive data.
Healthcare providers should also be trained on cybersecurity best practices to lessen the threat or risk of data breaches.
An hour of this cybersecurity training and frequent reminders to your healthcare team will go a long way to achieving success in your medical practice.
Each healthcare team should understand the risk of a data breach, recognize phishing attempts, and the importance of using a secure line of communication.
Ensuring standardized training and quality management
Virtual medical scribes must undergo extensive medical terminology and electronic health records training.
But before that, you need to carefully review the area for improvement to determine the training needs of your virtual scribe.
Another point of consideration is that each process that they’ll be trained in needs to be standardized to maintain the quality of delivery, accuracy of medical documentation, and patient experience.
Ensure that your virtual scribe is trained for emergency situations, urgent medical documentation, patient transfer scenarios, and other complex tasks they might encounter to fulfill their role.
Without training virtual scribes in your medical team, they are prone to errors, mistakes, and accuracy issues, which can be very frustrating for your doctors.
The Implementation Cost
The cost of implementation is the biggest hurdle to any medical facility that wants to hire virtual medical scribes.
Software and tools costs, implementation and migration assistance, and training for your in-house staff and medical team can put your medical clinic in a risky financial situation.
So, before hiring a service provider, be sure to consider your medical clinic’s current financial standing.
Select a customizable service
The virtual scribe service provider offers different levels of services to meet the unique needs of a medical practice.
So carefully select services and tailor them to the needs of each department, as this will impact patient care and workflow.
In Summary
A virtual scribe is an invaluable member and indispensable asset to any medical practice today.
High-quality patient-centered service can only be achieved through a better workflow provided by virtual scribes working in your practice or company.
