ENT Scribes Can Improve Patient Volume and Revenue

ENT scribes are an essential part of the healthcare team and contribute to the ENT physician’s productivity and efficiency. They help ENT physicians with a range of administrative and non-clinical tasks – from charting patient information to arranging for tests and appointments and much more thus creating a productive work environment. Reduced documentation burden and improved physician efficiency gives ENT physicians the time to see more patients or accomplish more with the ones they do see, ultimately increasing net revenue. ENT scribes also increase practice revenue by simply ensuring accurate coding. Let us in the blog post explore how ENT scribes can remove the EHR-data entry burden placed on ENT physicians and increase patient volume and overall revenue.

ENT physician productivity and use of scribes

Physician productivity is crucial to running a successful ENT practice. Physician productivity affects many aspects of health care including patient access to care, physician and patient satisfaction, quality of care, and physician reimbursements. Factors that adversely affect physician productivity include increased use of electronic health records, excessive paperwork, increased bureaucracy and regulations, burnout and so on. The use of ENT medical scribes is an effective strategy to improve physician productivity and generate more revenue for the practice. Wondering how? ENT scribes can decrease charting time and lead to significant improvements in physician productivity and job satisfaction. Most importantly, ENT physicians using scribes saw an increase in patient volume and a significant boost in their direct and downstream revenue.

Do EHRs make ENT physicians less productive?

It comes as no surprise that physicians including ENT physicians despise EHRs for one simple reason – it slows them down. It is no secret that EHRs require a significant amount of data entry and the burden falls entirely on the physician’s shoulders. As a result physician productivity drops between 25% and 40%. ENT physicians see fewer patients and practice revenue takes a big hit. A perfect way to overcome the productivity hurdles caused by EHRs is to take the help of ENT medical scribes to provide documentation assistance. Scribes not only made ENT physicians more efficient but also helped them in generating an ROI for their practice.

Can ENT virtual scribes help to increase patient volume and revenue?

ENT Specialists of Northwestern Pennsylvania, an otolaryngology clinic located in Erie, Pennsylvania found it challenging to keep up with the amount of electronic data entry required by the EHRs. Dr. Sidney P. Lipman an ENT specialist used the virtual scribes located remotely in a dedicated office space to perform documentation in the electronic health records in real-time. He found that by eliminating the time-consuming EHR data-entry burden ENT physicians were actually able to increase patient volumes by 3.6% and revenue by 32%. Following the implementation of the scribe program ENT physicians were able to see 4.14 patients per hour compared to 3.81 per hour prior to the implementation of the scribe program. This shows that using a remote scribe solution is a perfect choice as it brings in efficiency gains to an ENT practice.

With EHRs being increasingly used in ENT practices across the country concerns about their effects on physician productivity have been raised. ENT virtual scribes are one proposed way to see substantial improvements in physician productivity and revenue generation. If you are an ENT specialist and feel that the EHR documentation burden slows you down its time you take the help of Scribe4Me’s ENT virtual medical scribes. Our ENT scribes help to streamline the burdensome documentation process and free up time for direct patient care. What’s more? With our ENT scribes you spend less time on documentation and see more patients in a day, leading to increased revenue for the ENT practice.