The impact of scribes in an academic pediatric emergency department

TY - JOUR

T1 - The impact of scribes in an academic pediatric emergency department

AU - Rizvi, Munaza

AU - Friedman, Benjamin W.

AU - Fein, Daniel M.

AU - Khine, Hnin

N1 - Funding Information: We conducted a quasi‐experimental study in an urban quaternary academic PED with an annual census of 55,000. The study took place from July 2019 to Feb 2020. Board‐certified/eligible PEM physicians were recruited to participate in the study. A PEM physician with less than 10 postfellowship years was defined as a “junior provider,” whereas a physician with ≥10 years was defined as a “senior provider.” Physicians were defined as “clinical attending” if their primary responsibility was direct patient care. A “preceptor attending” was primarily responsible for supervising the trainees, including pediatric, emergency medicine, family medicine, and occasional surgical residents and PEM fellows. A preceptor attending was not restricted from seeing patients independently, but it was a rare occurrence in our study. Medical scribes were recruited from a commercial medical scribe company and underwent routine hospital onboarding as well as both off‐site and on‐site training. For our intervention, we assigned a medical scribe to a PEM physician for 9‐h shifts. Intervention shifts were randomly selected from Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays; control shifts were on Tuesdays or Thursdays. The study participants (PEM attendings) had the opportunity to work with medical scribes for a month before data collection started. The wRVUs/h for each shift were obtained from a professional coder service. The number of patients seen per shift was obtained from the electronic medical record. We evaluated the completeness of documentation by analyzing five predetermined key items (Appendix S1 ) of two chief complaints: (1) fever ≥ 102°F in a discharged patient and (2) abdominal pain requiring an ED stay > 2 h. The study was funded by a grant from the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and was approved by the institutional review board. Written consent was obtained from all providers.

PY - 2023/8

Y1 - 2023/8

KW - documentation

KW - emergency department

KW - medical scribes

KW - relative value units

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85149291779&partnerID=8YFLogxK

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U2 - 10.1111/acem.14690

DO - 10.1111/acem.14690

M3 - Letter

C2 - 36762868

AN - SCOPUS:85149291779

SN - 1069-6563

VL - 30

SP - 874

EP - 876

JO - Academic Emergency Medicine

JF - Academic Emergency Medicine

IS - 8

ER -