A pediatrician, particularly a primary care physician who specializes in treating infants and young children, has workflows and documentation needs that are different when compared to other specialties. Moreover, pediatric physicians need to exhibit a high degree of emotional intelligence and empathy as their patients are children. Communicating with them could be highly challenging. This is because children do not easily open up their health issues to doctors. Pediatricians need to focus keenly on communicating with both the child and the parent to correctly diagnose the problem. Amidst all this, inputting data in the EMR could be very difficult. Hence, having a pediatric scribe to take care of the documentation needs alleviates much of this problem.
The uniqueness of pediatric EMRs
An EMR system is an integral part of any pediatric practice. However, EMRs are not designed to meet the diverse and unique needs of pediatric care. In pediatrics, EMR needs to document certain aspects specific to the care of infants, children, and adolescents for which EMRs aren’t equipped. It needs to include newborn screening, growth charts, developmental milestone trackers, weight-based dosage calculations, wellness child exams, immunization record-keeping, and much more. All of these could make proper documentation of patient visits an absolute nightmare. No wonder most pediatric physicians turn to medical scribes to help ease the burden of dealing with cumbersome and time-consuming documentation.
How do pediatric scribes offer reprieve?
Pediatric scribes help resolve challenges associated with the use of EMRs. The pediatric medical scribes are highly trained and well-versed in the procedures, treatments, medical terminologies, slang, and jargon related to different pediatric conditions to ensure accurate documentation. Most importantly, they are adept in the technology and usage of pediatric EMRs. With the pediatric scribes taking over the data entry tasks, the pediatrician can focus on purely patient care activities.
A pediatric scribe helps the pediatrician by assuming the following roles and responsibilities.
- They document everything right from history taking to physical exams, diagnoses, procedures performed, medications prescribed, and follow-up care.
- Pediatric scribes document laboratory and other diagnostic test results as interpreted by the pediatrician.
- They are in charge of preparing referral letters as directed by the pediatric physician.
- Scribes undertake to proofread in order to identify errors or inconsistencies, thereby ensuring error-free documentation.
Benefits of pediatric scribes
- Using pediatric scribes decreases the time spent on charting, allowing pediatricians to focus on patient care.
- With pediatric scribes to take care of the charting and non-clinical tasks, physicians save one-third of their time. This allows them to add more patients to their schedule and focus on improving patient care.
- Complete and accurate documentation by the scribes streamlines the billing process that leads to faster reimbursements.
- Use of pediatric scribes is an effective strategy for improving productivity, practice revenue and, getting you to a better bottom line. A study also supports that scribes can help to improve the work RVU per visit in primary pediatric practice.
Caring for children is a highly demanding and challenging job. Children need specialized care and attention for optimal health and growth. With the help of pediatric scribes, you can focus entirely on caring for them, without having to worry about documentation and non-clinical tasks.