Some physicians at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) expressed concerns about the growing use of medical scribes to make entries into electronic health record systems.
George Gellert, M.D., of the CHRISTUS Health hospital system in Texas, said:
“The use of scribes is undermining the usual market forces that would drive the advancement of EHRs,” arguing that physicians may be “satisfied with a suboptimal product because ‘my scribes deal with it,'” thus slowing improvement of EHRs, which still leave much to be desired. Other physicians at the meeting discussed the danger of “mission creep,” in which over-busy physicians would let scribes, who are not clinicians, make EHR entries that should only be made by physicians.
