By Haley Holmes
Feb 02, 2023
Accurate and thorough documentation occupies a crucial role in mental health services. Detailed notes help mental health professionals in accurately diagnosing and treating patients. Generally, psychiatry notes are in a narrative style to provide a clear picture of what happened and what's going on with the patient. That is why psychiatrists find it challenging to balance note taking with spending ample time on patient care. The point is, patients do not open up their story or talk about their symptoms in a straight line. The psychiatrist has to make every effort to get the necessary and relevant information that's needed to make a perfect diagnosis. Typing while talking to patients can be time-efficient but you can miss out on crucial details. So, rather than having to divide your attention between the patient and the documentation, you can hire psychiatry virtual scribes to help you in documenting the encounter in real-time.
Need for scribes in a psychiatric practice
Being a psychiatrist means lots of patient interactions and dealing with extremely emotional sessions. You see patients all day long talking to them about their problems, behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and relationships. During a patient visit, you have to review the patient's medical history, assess symptoms, conduct a psychological evaluation and take notes at the same time. You need to listen to your patient attentively, asking as many questions as required, in order to fully understand their problem. You also need to watch for the obvious and the most subtle visual and verbal cues, all while simultaneously documenting in the EHR. Sounds challenging! Well, why struggle doing both? Hiring medical scribes takes the documentation burden off your shoulders while you make your patient feel safe, secure and listened to. Else, they may not feel comfortable being fully open and honest about their feelings or problems. This can be difficult for making the right diagnosis and the treatment to be effective as intended.
Psychiatric documentation requirements and how scribes protect both the providers and the patients
Documentation in behavioral health should adhere to certain prescribed standards. It is crucial that the psychiatrist strictly follows these guidelines to avoid allegations and negligence. Hence, it is the personal responsibility of every psychiatrist to document in a way that it complies with regulatory requirements to protect them from the risk of legal proceedings. We also know that accurate and complete documentation lays the foundation for making the perfect diagnosis and developing an effective mental health treatment plan. A psychiatric medical scribe's responsibility is to capture accurate and detailed documentation of the psychiatric assessment. With a scribe there is no risk of missing out on any crucial details due to splitting focus between the EHR and the patient. Many medical negligence lawsuits stem from documentation errors, omissions or misdiagnosis. Hence, hiring a medical scribe helps protect both the patient and the provider.
Benefits of hiring scribes for your psychiatric practice
Over the past decade, the changing landscape of mental healthcare has necessitated psychiatrists to be more efficient in order to provide exceptional care to those with mental health and behavioral problems. Scribes prove to be beneficial in behavioral healthcare, reducing the documentation burden imposed on psychiatrists without compromising on providing quality care. A web-based survey conducted to assess the effectiveness of scribes in a psychiatric practice shows three important values of working with scribes.
Overall, eight out of eleven psychiatrists who enrolled in the psychiatric scribe pilot program expressed great satisfaction rates - improved productivity and provider experience.
Are you a psychiatrist struggling to focus on what is being said while typing those lengthy notes? Do not fret. We at Scribe4Me have specialty-specific psychiatric scribes who can provide high-quality charting directly in your EHRs, while you focus on performing assessments and evaluations for mental illness treatment. With Scribe4Me's medical scribes you free yourself from lengthy documentation that consumes most of your time. You have more time to focus on important tasks like patient interviews, group meetings, and therapy or counseling sessions. For more information on how our psychiatric scribes cab help your practice visit www.scribe4me.com or give us a call at (908)736-4180.
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Documentation is an important daily clinical responsibility. In order to optimize patient care, physicians are always on the lookout for new ways to effectively and efficiently document patient visits.
The use of virtual medical scribes has become increasingly popular in the recent years, as medical practices across the country are on the constant lookout for ways to reduce clinical documentation overload, thereby improving overall productivity.
The clerical burden associated with EHR usage is attributed as the number one cause of physician burnout. We also know that physicians spend twice as much time on EHRs and other clerical tasks compared to the time providing patient care.
