A Medical Scribe Specialist is essentially a real-time personal assistant to the physician, performing documentation in the Electronic Health Record system, gathering information for the patient’s visit, and partnering with the physician to deliver the pinnacle of efficient patient care and electronic payment processing.

Many physicians report that working with medical scribes—who assist with administrative tasks during patient visits, such as by entering information into EHRs—enables them to spend more of their time caring for more patients.

Little research exists, however, on whether employing scribes leads to a large enough boost to physician productivity to save hospitals money on the whole, or how the presence of scribes affects patient safety.

To help close the research gap, Katherine Walker, director of emergency medicine research for Cabrini Hospital, and her colleagues randomly assigned medical scribes to 88 doctors in five EDs in Australia between November 2016 and January 2018. The study was the first multicenter, randomized study to evaluate scribes’ impact on physician productivity or patient safety incidents.

Researchers collected data from 589 shifts with scribes and 3,296 shifts without scribes. The researchers also tracked self-reported patient safety incidents associated with scribed shifts.

The study found that medical scribes increased physicians’ productivity throughout most of the ED sites. Across all shifts, the presence of scribes increased the number of patients seen per doctor per hour by almost 16%. The biggest increase in productivity was seen in primary consultations, during which scribes increased the number of patients seen by more than 25%.