Medical Scribe Use Growing outside ED

Medical scribes are moving out of the emergency department (ED) to help physicians from other specialties with electronic documentation, according to an August 24, 2013, article in Modern Healthcare. Medical scribes enter information about patient encounters into electronic health records (EHRs); they were initially very popular in busy EDs, but the fairly recent promotion of EHR use through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is prompting other specialties to look into using these services as well. One scribe company states that his group is “getting three or four times as many request for scribes from clinic-based physicians as from emergency medicine groups.”