Physician burnout has been a hot topic since before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Google reveals over 15 Million hits on the topic, dominated by how significant the problem is (44% of providers report symptoms) and the main causes (too much time documenting in the EHR and not enough focused on patients). Given all the attention and range of magic pill cures offered by industry vendors, it’s interesting to note how few approaches make a measurable difference validated by independent 3rd party research versus vendor marketing materials. The lone exception is Virtual Scribes.
KLAS recently published their first market report on Virtual Scribing Services and noted some interesting results
that can be achieved by Virtual Scribes:
- Improved physician satisfaction (i.e., improved work-life balance and quality of life)
- Improved patient experience (e.g., more engaging interactions, shorter wait times)
- Physicians catching up on documentation backlog
- More complete and accurate documentation that sometimes results in increased revenue
- Increased schedule utilization among patients, allowing physicians to see more patients per day
- Physicians being able to work on other tasks
Not surprisingly, KLAS reported “AQuity Solutions’ services as highly effective and beneficial, and more likely … to report achieving key outcomes” noting best in market results for:
- Decreased Physician Burnout
- Improved Workflow
- Improved Same Day Chart Closures
In parallel, Black Book Research has covered the Virtual Scribe market for two years, ranking AQuity number one based on being top ranked in 11 of 18 KPI categories both years according to actual client experiences, far outpacing the rest of the 20 vendor field.
A recent AMA study noted, “In a survey of over 5,000 physician EHR users, the researchers found that EHR usability largely received an “F” rating when evaluating a standardized metric of technology usability. And those “F” grades were strongly tied to high physician burnout scores.” In a follow-up to that research, EHRIntelligence presented an article titled ‘Are Human Scribes Truly Effective for Safe EHR Documentation?’ where they concluded “A well trained human scribe doing EHR documentation can boost patient safety and reduce the clinician burden.”
EHRIntelligence also wrote ‘Medical Scribes Ease EHR Documentation, Boost Provider Profits’ where they summarized another AMA study from the Annals of Internal Medicine where “Researchers found medical scribes can increase patients seen per day because scribes take on most of the EHR documentation workload.”
KLAS, Black Book, and multiple AMA studies agree. If you want to reduce physician burnout, increase patient volumes, and boost practice profits, virtual scribes are the answer and AQuity delivers industry leading results.
