What is a Scribe?
Vituity’s scribe program has grown from exclusively serving emergency departments to now serving inpatient departments and outpatient settings such as oncology and primary care clinics.
Scribes document patients’ medical histories and physical exams as they work with Vituity healthcare providers in the emergency department. They also work closely with our hospitalists in intensive care, telemetry, medical-surgical, and other units to help with documentation of admissions, rounding, and discharge.
Our scribes are trained in medical terminology and documentation. They receive customized training using the Electronic Health Record (EHR) or documentation system specific to their hospital.
Scribes do not perform any clinical duties, nor do they provide direct patient care. But they assist with a number of important tasks and play a key role in allowing physicians to spend more time with patients.
A scribe’s role primarily consists of the following:
- Documentation of inpatient admissions, rounding, and discharges
- Documentation of the clinical encounter and diagnostic studies
- Tracking the progress of diagnostic studies
- Alerting the provider when studies have been completed
- Reviewing charts for proper and complete documentation
- Preparing discharge summaries and sending them to PCPs
Typically, scribes are either undergraduates or post-baccalaureate students with an interest in the healthcare field. Most (but not all) scribes have the intention of attending medical, physician assistant, or nursing school.