Urology Scribes– Frees Up Urologists To Focus On Patient Care

Urology Scribes– Frees Up Urologists To Focus On Patient Care

Urologists are generally extremely busy professionals with a hectic and demanding work schedule. And it is no surprise that high burnout rates among urologists were identified by a recent Medscape study. Fifty-four percent of urologists reported feeling burned out, the highest among all surveyed medical specialties. The most common contributing factors include excessive administrative work, heavy patient load, extended work hours, and lack of institutional resources. No wonder many urologists have started to take the help of medical scribes to reduce their administrative workload and improve efficiency, workflow and patient experience.

The following are some of the research-backed evidence and reputed urologist's views on the perks of using urology scribes.

• Research increasingly supports the use of medical scribes in urology practices. A study was conducted in an academic urology practice, where scribes were randomly assigned to urologists for one clinic day every week for three months. At the end of three months the urologists reported improved productivity and work satisfaction. They were also able to see more patients per clinic session resulting in an increase in wRVUs.
• Generally urology visits are highly sensitive in nature. However, the use of scribes didn’t seem to reduce patient satisfaction in anyway. Scribes remained in the exam room throughout the patient visit and patient satisfaction was high with 93% of them expressing utmost satisfaction when compared to 87% without scribes. Furthermore, it was observed that it was the urologists who were more satisfied with the scribe’s experience. 70% of the urologists showed high satisfaction levels using a medical scribe as compared with 20% of those who did not utilize the services of a scribe.
• Another study that closely examined the cost-benefit analysis of medical scribes in an academic urology clinic reported that implementing scribes could considerably increase patient flow and decrease the burden of clinical documentation. However, this is a frugal approach only if the additional revenue that comes in from seeing additional patients per day is adequate to offset the cost of hiring the scribes.
• The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine published a review in 2015 on the implementation of medical scribes, citing five research studies, including the 2010 urology study. The authors stated that use of medical scribes improved provider efficiency, revenue and satisfaction, and provider-patient interactions. However, they concluded that more research needs to be done.
• Michael Murphy, the co-founder and CEO of ScribeAmerica, who provides urology scribes to several urology practices across 13 states in the US said that one client added new patients daily to their schedule and was able to complete charts on the same day with the help of scribes.
• Dr. Neil Baum,a Urology Specialist in New Orleans, LA states that he has been using scribes and feels that scribes improve physician productivity by 20% to 30%. He also says that having scribes helped him see an additional patient every hour. By seeing two additional patients per day, it was more than enough to cover the cost of the scribe.
• Dr. Anne Suskind aboard certified Urologist in San Francisco claims that her department has witnessed high levels of provider and patient satisfaction, despite the fact that a pilot study is still underway.
• Dr Stork, another urologist is of the opinion that EHR burden is one of the main contributors to physician burnout and having a scribe can help mitigate this problem.

The use of medical scribes has become increasingly prevalent in urology practices to improve efficiency and productivity of urologists. If you are a urologist and juggling administrative work and patient care, it’s time you start incorporating scribes into your practice. By hiring professionally trained urology scribes to handle non-clinical tasks you can focus on your core mission –patient care.