Artificial intelligence in health care: Better studies are needed

An article in Newsweek magazine says, “Artificial intelligence will cure America’s sick health care system” using data and automation to “drive down the costs of health care while increasing effectiveness.” According to Newsweek, it will work like this for diabetes. A company called Virta Health has come up with a smartphone app that is like “a live-in doctor and diabetes coach.” Type 2 diabetics who enroll will enter data such as blood sugar levels, weight, blood pressure, and activity manually …

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Behind the Curtain: A Day in the Life of an ED Scribe

By Franklin Pachay, Jr. “Clinical Information Manager,” or simply “CIM,” is my reply when a new face in the emergency department (ED) asks what I do. The reaction that follows is probably best described as awkward confusion. I make sure to follow through by explaining that I’m a medical scribe and outline a few things that I do: I help create the physician note; I get the radiology results into the charts; I follow up with labs; I increase clinician …

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How working as a scribe prepared me for medical school

STEVEN KRAGER | EDUCATION | MARCH 7, 2012 105SHARES Share Tweet Share After undergrad, and before starting medical school, I worked for two years as scribe in the emergency department. I followed emergency physicians and completed their charts as they saw patients. I would also remind the physicians of various tasks to complete, alert them of abnormal lab values and pull up x-rays to be interpreted. One of the reasons I wanted the job was to gain experience in medicine, …

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I’m equal parts doctor, scribe, and mouse jockey

And I don’t love it. When I gained acceptance into medical school, I thought I would one day have one amazing job, or at least one job title where I might get to wear several meaningful hats. I’m a physician anesthesiologist. It’s my duty to play a role in improving the health and the lives of my patients. I studied and trained for many years to have the privilege of understanding the inner workings of the human body, the many …

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My experience with a scribe in the emergency department

I have a lovely pen. It’s a Mont Blanc Meisterstück fountain pen. My group bought it for me on my tenth anniversary as a partner in our emergency medicine practice. It’s a luxury I would never have paid for myself, though I have loved and used fountain pens since I was in college. Ironically, about the time I got it, the window of opportunity to use it in my professional life closed. For a decade, we had a hybrid paper-and-dictation …

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Physician burnout: Why it’s not a fair fight

Physician Burnout vs. Fulfillment Why it’s Not a Fair Fight [ our complete Burnout Basics Resource Library is here ] Why does having a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment as a modern doctor seem like such a struggle at times? There is an invisible battle going on, day-by-day between our search for a Fulfilling Career in Medicine and the hidden forces of Physician Burnout. In this article, I will outline why this is most certainly not a “fair fight”. Modern …

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Scribes lead to unintended consequences from electronic medical records

Recently, Dr. Scot Silverstein over at Health Care Renewal published this update to the ongoing story of electronic medical records that are so simple, intuitive and easy to use that doctors and hospitals everywhere are being forced to hire “scribes” to run them. We’d looked at the resurgence of scribes in a previous post, and Dr. Silverstein’s article seems to confirm that the phenomenon is is here to stay for as long as most “conventional” EMRs remain fundamentally defective.  As …

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Who is caring for the caregivers? A medical scribe’s perspective

I’m not going to be a doctor. It feels more like a confession than a statement — like I’m disappointing someone. Each time I say, or even think, those words, I feel as if I need to atone for it. Survey a hundred scribes.  Ask them of their goal in becoming a scribe, and all of them will tell you about higher aspirations. They want to be surgeons, cardiologists, intensivists, or neurologists. They dream of practicing primary care, infectious disease, …

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Why medical scribes are accidental blessings

Some doctors choose medicine because of the medicine, and some doctors choose medicine because of the people. I veer towards the latter: Medicine is my tool to help the person sitting across from me. However, I am finding more and more stuff getting in between me and my patients, primarily my computer. The increasing burden of gathering coded health data in the EMR, especially in light of the impending MACRA, MIPS regulations and the various private insurance compliance requirements, has …

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