The American College of Medical Scribe Specialists (ACMSS) Commemorates National Medical Scribe Week, June 1-7, 2014 – celebrated annually the first full week of June.  In honorarium, the president addresses medical scribes and the state of the industry through a commemorative letter:

“Honoring You, the Medical Scribe!”

Einstein was quoted once as saying, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”  During this year’s “Medical Scribe Appreciation Week”, we are reflecting on all of the hard work being performed by medical scribes, especially those who push themselves the extra yard to achieve their ACMSS certification!  The medical scribe industry is grateful for your professionalism.

Medical scribes are by definition, ambitious individuals, driven towards excellence who have a passion for helping others. It is because of medical scribes that doctors today find they can more easily comply with meaningful use of certified electronic health records and build more rapport at the patient’s bedside than in front of a computer. Time motion studies demonstrate that physicians spend 44% of their time in front of the computer. This is time that is better spent in front of their patients. In short, medical scribes are improving the experience of medical care for both providers and patients. If I want a meaningful visit with my doctor, I hope she has a scribe.

For medical providers that are not working with a medical scribe yet, they find they have to compromise when performing data entry either by seeing less patients, spending less time with patients, documenting less and accepting decreased reimbursement, or staying significantly past their shifts in sacrifice of their personal and family life. These are losing propositions all the way around and have contributed to wide-use of the term “physician burnout”. Many providers have admitted that working with a medical scribe has extended their medical careers and interest in medicine again. As a board-certified emergency physician, I personally thank you medical scribe!

Doctors are not the only ones who love their medical scribe. Patients really like the idea of having a medical scribe in the room since they realize it allows their doctor to spend more face-time with them, spend less time in the waiting room, and they like witnessing how much more communicative their provider is during the patient encounter.

The timing of the medical scribe industry comes just as the perfect storm of healthcare delivery obstacles gathers in its ferocity. With insufficient medical residency spots to develop new physicians, an aging baby-boomer population that is living longer with chronic diseases, fewer hospitals than there were 20 years ago, and recent increases in health care utilization due to the Affordable Care Act, today’s physicians have to be more productive and efficient than previous generations of the medical establishment. And, they have to do so with more complex tools (read data entry into EHR), under the microscope of Press Ganey and HCAPH scores, value-based purchasing models and the looming specter of recovery audit contractors. Becoming a provider today is not for the faint of heart. Thank heaven for medical scribes whose documentation focus helps doctors create comprehensive and accurate charting without sacrificing patient face-time.

At the ACMSS, we have been certifying hundreds of medical scribes and advocating for the medical scribe industry all the while. More recently, this certification process has taken a whole new level of importance. At the annual HIMSS conference, our talks with CMS representatives revealed that medical scribes who achieve their certification would be allowed to perform computerized physician order entry and qualify for meaningful use. On the heels of this, the medical scribe job category successfully achieved professional standing as an independent and new medical specialty by the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Professionals (CAAHEP). This was solely achieved by the efforts of ACMSS when Executive Director, Ms. Kristin Hagen, and I traveled to San Antonio, Texas to present at the annual CAAHEP conference.

The future for medical scribes and the medical scribe industry is white hot. Medical scribes career positions are a mainstay, with compensation in the high 5-figure or even 6-figure salary range. This is welcome news to the vast majority of medical scribes who are contemplating changing careers from becoming medical providers to assisting medical providers through specialized documentation.

Medical scribes are becoming more specialized as well as we see them working not only with emergentologists but with orthopedists, cardiologists, ophthalmologists, internists, rheumatologists, pediatricians, obstetricians, gynecologists,…honestly, practically every specialty now has been penetrated with a medical scribe. With more than 800,000 physicians and many more nurse practitioners and physician assistants, anyone can see there is a long runway ahead.

Keep up the great work medical scribes and know that ACMSS supports, honors, and celebrates you!

Sincerely,

Luis A. Moreno, Jr., M.D., President

About ACMSS

The American College of Medical Scribe Specialists (ACMSS) is the nation’s only nonprofit professional society representing over 15,000 Medical Scribes in over 550 medical institutions nationwide.   ACMSS partners with academic institutions, vocational training organizations, and medical scribe corporations to offer both education-to-certification and employment-to-certification pathways. ACMSS advances the needs of the medical scribe industry through certification, MSCAT development, public advocacy, and continuing education.  To learn more about ACMSS, please visit:  www.theacmss.org.

Medical Document Services of Kansas, LLC (MDS) is a Wichita, Kansas healthcare document service with education programs in Medical Scribe Specialists and Medical Transcription, now Healthcare Document Specialist.  Our programs are approved by The Kansas Board of Regents and The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity.  MDS is a Certified Academic Partner with The American College of Medical Scribe Specialist . Call 866-777-7264 today, or visit our website, www.mdsofkansas.com, for more information. #medicalscribes #medicaltranscription #mdsofkansas