Power of the Scribe

Our Physician Facilitators (PF) represent a powerful resource that can markedly increase you and your team’s efficiency. Please carefully consider and implement the following strategies for maximizing the power of your scribes:

• Integrate the PF into Your Workflow: Optimize your scribe’s time by verbalizing your exam findings, labs, and medication orders (including dosages) in the patient’s room. To make the most of your time and communication, these orders are best incorporated into your conversations with the patient, and these conversations become more comfortable and natural the more you practice.

• Bringing Dead Time to Life: Another helpful method to “create more time” is to have the scribe complete the procedure note while you are actually performing the procedure. This is particularly helpful when repairing a large laceration; the entire note can be verbally reviewed and completed along with all checkmarks while you are still sterile and actively repairing the wound.

• PFs are Techs: When you are ahead of the team, it is unhelpful to be possessive of your scribe. Our Physician Facilitators are exceptional in that they are also fully-trained techs who can jump in to bolster the efforts of our clinical staff. Empower your scribe to switch back and forth flexibly depending on patient volume and overall workflow.

• Utilize Scribes for X-ray Overreads: You can login to OpalWeb on your desktop and your scribe’s laptop simultaneously (of course, you must enter your login information as no one else can ever know it). The scribe will pull up the reading for each unread study and confirm the patient’s name, study type, initial reader, and the reading itself as you are loading and looking at the films on your separate screen. At your direction, the scribe will type “Agree” and add any modifying comments you have. The scribe then closes the reading and changes the status to Read. The scribe can also pull up encounter notes for review on any Viztek/Opal studies that do not have initial readings, as these often take much longer to overread given the need for clinical verification of the treating provider’s initial impression in the encounter note. This efficient team approach will significantly reduce the time it takes to complete overreads. Similarly, the scribe can use this approach to enter the initial readings for your active patients from her/his laptop. 

• Final Points:

  • Mentor the scribe if you find errors rather than silently correcting these yourself. These errors often lead to preventable frustration, and the scribes cannot correct mistakes about which they are unaware.

  • Advise the scribe at the beginning of the shift if you have any specific preferences as it is easier than trying to add/correct manually on each chart later.