A Busy Doctor’s Right Hand, Ever Ready to Type - NYTimes.com: Without much fanfare or planning, scribes have entered the scene in hundreds of clinics and emergency rooms. Physicians who use them say they feel liberated from the constant note-taking that modern electronic health records systems demand.
A study
published jointly in October by the American Medical Association and
RAND Corporation found that electronic health records were a major
contributor to physician dissatisfaction, as doctors negotiate a cranky
truce between talking to and examining the patient, and the ceaseless
demands of the computer. And a recent article
in the journal Health Affairs concluded that two-thirds of a primary
care physician’s day was spent on clerical work that could be done by
someone else; among the recommended solutions was the hiring of scribes
