

The chart itself will be broken down into segments like HPI (history of present illness) which is essentially a brief description of why the patient is there, a list of symptoms, the physical exam, studies ordered, the treatment plan, and any prescriptions the doctor orders.Ī good scribe will observe everything during a physician-patient encounter and fill out those portions of the EHR with minimal instructions. Your main job as a scribe is to record everything you hear and see during the physician’s entire visit with a patient and record that information in the appropriate part of the electronic chart. Yes, dictation is a big part of the job of the scribe, but you are doing much more than that. Scribes aren’t simply copying down everything a physician says. It’s important to understand that scribes are not transcriptionists. It’s just a small stepping stone to your overall future career in health care. But at the end of the day, you are getting clinical experience for medical school so who cares. Some people can get a little salty about how cheap scribe labor is for the amount of work you do. It’s a win-win situation, scribe companies can offer their services to hospitals/doctors cheap and pre-health students can get valuable experience working right next to a physician. Some brilliant entrepreneurs got the idea, let’s recruit pre-health students who are desperately looking for clinical experience for cheap scribe labor in order to remove those charting tasks from physicians. The electronic health record, or EHR, is arguably the largest reason why physicians struggle to spend enough time with their patients. In fact, on average physicians were spending only about 13-16 minutes per patient! With the increase of charting responsibilities, physicians have been spending less and less time with their patients. In addition to this, a scribe may help further assist with the workload by chasing down labs and scans, making phone calls, and other random tasks that don’t require a medical school education. What Do Medical Scribes Do? In a nutshell, the primary duty of a medical scribe is to alleviate the workload of a physician primarily by doing his or her electronic charting. Let’s dig deeper into scribing so you can decide for yourself if it’s right for you. This kind of opportunity trains you to think like a physician and puts you in an excellent position to start networking.īut there is so much more to scribing that makes it worth it. Not only does being a scribe boost your medical school application, but it has you work side by side with physicians. One clinical experience that you might be thinking of is becoming a medical scribe, but is being a medical scribe really worth it? The answer is yes, being a medical scribe is totally worth it.

Extracurriculars related to medicine are very important for every premed student’s medical school application.
