healthy4u: scribe

At my Sept. 2010 post "<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/09/ultimate-workaround-to-mission-hostile.html">The Ultimate Workaround To Mission Hostile Health IT: Humans (a.k.a. Scribes)</a>" I had written that: <blockquote>The EMR is a technology that was supposed to improve clinical medicine (revolutionize it, some say). It was supposed to facilitate clinical medicine. It was not supposed to slow physicians and others down to the point of impairing their ability to practice medicine. However, the rosy predictions are not proving to be the case. Instead, we have the ultimate workaround to the health IT <a href="http://www.tinyurl.com/hostileuserexper">mission hostile user experience</a>: [the medical scribe].</blockquote> On the <a href="http://histalk2.com/2011/01/25/news-12611/">HisTALK blog</a> today, apparently one medical center agrees: <blockquote>By February, all ER physicians at DePaul Health Center (MO) <a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_e7d30068-fedd-5da5-bc12-1f570591ee0d.html" target="_blank">will be using</a> scribes for electronic medical documentation. Administrators hope to improve staff productivity as well as patient satisfaction. Apparently patients were “annoyed” that doctors were sharing their attention with a computer.</blockquote> In the cited article "<a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_e7d30068-fedd-5da5-bc12-1f570591ee0d.html">Scribes are finding their place in emergency rooms</a>" by Michele Munz, St. Louis Post-dispatch.com, Jan. 25, 2011: <blockquote>"[With a scribe] I can just completely focus on and deal with the patient," [ED physician] Lebo said. The emergency department at DePaul Health Center in Bridgeton, which sees about 60,000 patients a year, is the first to use scribes in the St. Louis area. By February, all the hospital's emergency physicians will have a scribe tapping away at a laptop or tablet computer while they work. Across the nation, about 200 hospital emergency departments have started using scribes, most within the last two years, according to the three major companies providing scribes.</blockquote> Several points worthy of note: <ul><li>The cost of scribes will be an issue affecting the supposed ROI of EHR's, and are necessitated by the fact that the EHR and its mission hostile nature get in the way of physicians. (See Dr. Doug Perednia's analysis at <a href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/11/scribes-lead-unintended-consequences-electronic-medical-records.html">this link</a>.) </li></ul><ul><li>Scribes are a workaround to the <a href="http://www.tinyurl.com/hostileuserexper">mission hostile user experience</a>.</li></ul><ul style="font-weight: bold;"><li>You should not have to work around something that is not in the way.</li></ul><ul><li>That a technology touted as of extreme benefit now is seen to need an "isolation layer" between enduser and subject of the system's benefits is another example of how health IT remains an experiment.</li></ul> -- SS

BLOGSCAN - By Feb. all ER physicians at DePaul Health Center (MO) will be using scribes

At my Sept. 2010 post "The Ultimate Workaround To Mission Hostile Health IT: Humans (a.k.a. Scribes)" I had written that:The EMR is a technology that was supposed to improve clinical medicine (revol…

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<div style="text-align: center;">"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic doctor. Dr. Data will be that doctor; <s style="font-style: italic;">better</s> worse than he was before. <s style="font-style: italic;">Better, stronger, faster</s> Worse, weaker, slower." -- parody of Oscar Goldman from the 1970's scifi series <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HofoK_QQxGc">The Six Million Dollar Man</a>. </div><div style="text-align: center;"> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqzasoTiRKrqW917SPMiqTdjbdN5HIlHCXgUfbNIfBWTD4XeQkZfy9lf5N9Xco8sPERtjLya5T8uhctdg9j4zFlVjiuCkMzFzon9ihChnpVyKp66kif_i3xYmzW8DByUScF3aAEaJy6w61/s1600/sixmillion.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5513937992318855618" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqzasoTiRKrqW917SPMiqTdjbdN5HIlHCXgUfbNIfBWTD4XeQkZfy9lf5N9Xco8sPERtjLya5T8uhctdg9j4zFlVjiuCkMzFzon9ihChnpVyKp66kif_i3xYmzW8DByUScF3aAEaJy6w61/s320/sixmillion.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 187px; height: 121px;" /></a>"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him." </div><div style="text-align: center;"> <div style="text-align: left;">The EMR is a technology that was supposed to improve clinical medicine (revolutionize it, some say). It was supposed to facilitate clinical medicine. It was not supposed to slow physicians and others down to the point of impairing their ability to practice medicine. However, the rosy predictions are not proving to be the case. Instead, we have the ultimate workaround to the health IT <a href="http://www.tinyurl.com/hostileuserexper">mission hostile user experience</a>: <blockquote>Los Angeles Times September 6, 2010 <div class="byline"> Harris Meyer <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-medical-scribes-20100906,0,2694959.story">Scribes are doctors' tech support</a> Melissa Genove has dreamed of becoming a physician since childhood. To help her prepare, she spends as many as 35 hours each week shadowing emergency room doctors at Loma Linda University Medical Center. The 23-year-old listens intently as they examine patients, records their treatment plans in a laptop computer, and follows up on prescriptions, lab tests, consultations with specialists and anything else the doctors order. Genove is not an intern, or even a medical student. She is the chief medical scribe in the hospital's emergency department — and one of several thousand young people pioneering a new healthcare field. Scribes are filling a necessary niche as doctors make the wrenching transition from old-fashioned paper charts to 21st century electronic medical records. The computerized system is supposed to make doctors more efficient and ensure better care for patients. Congress has such faith in the value of electronic medical records that it provided as much as $27 billion over 10 years to encourage doctors to use them, and the Centers for <a class="taxInlineTagLink" id="HEPRG00002" title="Medicare" href="http://www.latimes.com/topic/health/government-health-care/medicare-HEPRG00002.topic">Medicare</a> and Medicaid Services will penalize those who don't by cutting their reimbursement rates as much as 5%. But while the conversion is underway, doctors estimate that their productivity plummets by about 30% as they learn to cope with a complicated new system. [And what clinical IT in 2010 isn't complicated, I ask? - ed.] That's where scribes come in.</div></blockquote><div class="byline"> </div> This brings real meaning to the observation that "you should not have to work around something that is not in the way." <div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuU_k88RnHpQsZuxQqubBBxqzCSNIcPnx0vkTOwPc2fQZxA4JcqMshHV21HrzV-cTje_k_iXnqkA02yE6mz7d2M8_kEremGFdfSsMI17KQ5JIGnJMd6FrVyDWXlLDdUHRzVI-DTq72Aeen/s1600/labyrinth.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5514150356466381106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuU_k88RnHpQsZuxQqubBBxqzCSNIcPnx0vkTOwPc2fQZxA4JcqMshHV21HrzV-cTje_k_iXnqkA02yE6mz7d2M8_kEremGFdfSsMI17KQ5JIGnJMd6FrVyDWXlLDdUHRzVI-DTq72Aeen/s320/labyrinth.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 237px;" /></a>Just one screen from a Cerner product (from a presentation touting recent addition of a simple database "<a href="http://www.screencast.com/users/kkoche1/folders/Jing/media/5d3aa28f-2312-4a40-8e0d-47c15dcaee90">search</a>" feature that should/could have been present eons ago). Each menu item leads to even more screens, subscreens, menus and pick lists, in labyrinthine fashion. Click to enlarge. </div> In a domain as complex as medicine, ever-increasing demands for fine grained data on clinical encounters now outstrip the 2010-style human-computer interface's abilities to allow capture of the data without massive interference in the process of medicine itself. This mismatch is due largely to the limitations of the GUI as the primary user interface (UI) metaphor, especially the widget-centric UI currently in vogue, characterized by massive numbers of screens and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI_widget">GUI widgets</a>, labyrinthine navigation, and forced data entry of artificially and needlessly "atomized" data through interaction with multiple widgets. CPOE as an example has become a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine">Rube Goldberg</a> contraption (def: "deliberately over-engineered machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion"), the furthest thing from a straightforward "typewriter for orders" as can be. For instance, a simple order requires interaction with search boxes, multiple drop down lists, scroll bars, check boxes, and other widgets to capture each micro-component of the order, wasting much time compared to writing "Sotalol hydrochloride 120 mg PO BID, first dose now." There are alternatives to "data atomization" and "widget-centricity" in the health IT user interface, apart from simply cleaning up the current interaction disorganization and other weaknesses, but the health IT industry seems largely oblivious to alternatives. <div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh21K_FklxQqTMcml0C6D5UHN3L7VF4tMXNK6_X6XNKFF0BSXZG3ClJ_iM5IDHpuWCnJgFW_rnArDAlIoBui_M_utv0-WOQXQM7rNzuKpRkbNAj3mmSoIMRhE2jd0SpRFXvkgB15CQOyl1N/s1600/Rubenvent.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5514195533630289058" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh21K_FklxQqTMcml0C6D5UHN3L7VF4tMXNK6_X6XNKFF0BSXZG3ClJ_iM5IDHpuWCnJgFW_rnArDAlIoBui_M_utv0-WOQXQM7rNzuKpRkbNAj3mmSoIMRhE2jd0SpRFXvkgB15CQOyl1N/s320/Rubenvent.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 129px;" /></a>Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin: EMR's have become machines that perform simple tasks in a very complex fashion </div> Unfortunately, it's difficult to show this complexity using actual EMR images, as most health IT vendors avoid posting screen images and user manuals online, and forbid customers from doing so. They are excessively secretive about their products. Try a Google image search on 'Cerner Millenium' as an example (click <a href="http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=FKy&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&q=cerner%20millenium&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1680&bih=861">here</a>), then compare to an image search on, say, Microsoft Word (click <a href="http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=q3I&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&biw=1680&bih=861&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=microsoft+word&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=">here</a>). The inappropriate-for-medicine, management information systems (MIS)-derived business model of the healthcare IT vendors and <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases/?loc=cases&sloc=ecosystem">HIT ecosystem</a> also contributes to the, at best, stuck-in-the-1980's health IT user interface. (As an example of these issues, the industry wouldn't even listen to aforementioned UI alternatives even if I served them up on a silver platter, because using the advice would require significant investments on their part to incorporate alternative UI approaches into their products, meaning lower short and medium term profits. Unlike pharma and tangible medical devices, interest in advanced R&D in the health IT industry seems nil. Instead, complacency rules.) An important question to ponder is whether the dream of the health IT pioneers back in the 1950's and 1960's was too idealistic and indeed unrealistic to begin with. Was it based on "2001, A Space Odyssey"-style overoptimism, and the lack of foreknowledge of how little true progress would be made in the commercial IT market in human computer interaction, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, voice recognition, and other innovations by the 21st century? <blockquote>Doctors have embraced the scribes as well. "The physicians were spending too much time documenting and not enough time with the patient," said Dr. Robert Steele, chief of Loma Linda's emergency department, which began using scribes in November. "The solution was to take the doctors off the computer, put them at the bedside, and let the scribe do the transcription. It's been a huge success. The physicians love it.</blockquote> It is not hard to understand why physicians, with their years of training and expertise, would welcome relief from extremely tedious clerical tasks. <blockquote>Leaders of the three biggest companies providing scribes estimate that about 200 emergency departments in community hospitals and academic medical centers currently use them. More scribes are on the way. Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Emory University Hospital in Atlanta and Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City said they are exploring the idea. Physicians in other specialties, including urology and family practice, also are starting to adopt scribes. Still, some physicians question whether college students are equipped to handle the complicated task of charting patients after only two to four months of training. Others wonder why it's necessary to hire additional staff to fill out computerized records that were supposed to be simpler and more efficient than paper.</blockquote> The key phrase is "were supposed to be simpler and more efficient" than paper. I'd likely be hard-pressed to find robust research supporting that assertion in the scientific literature. I'd be more likely find the origins of this meme in vendor marketing materials. <blockquote> "It will be interesting to watch whether the need for scribes goes away as the next generation of physicians who grew up with computers and electronic medical records comes in," said Dr. Ann O'Malley, a senior researcher at the Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington, D.C.</blockquote> This passage implies the bottleneck is those physicians who need to "get used to the IT", whereas a major component of the problem is the health IT user interface itself. Scribes might "go away" if the health IT user experience was vastly improved. The IT needs to become more physician and medicine-friendly. <blockquote> At Loma Linda [Hospital], Steele said doctors used to spend two minutes with a patient, then take four minutes typing the information into a computer. Now the doctor talks to the patient with the scribe present and summarizes the encounter to the scribe in 30 seconds. While the scribe spends three minutes entering the information into an ever-present laptop, the doctor can spend extra time with the patient. Afterward, the doctor checks the accuracy of the scribe's chart, makes any necessary additions or corrections, and signs off. Although novice scribes sometimes need the doctor's help in understanding terminology, those with several months' experience usually are spot-on, Steele said. </blockquote> Again, clerical work is a very poor use of a physician's time. Scribes are a good idea considering 2010's EMR technology, at least from the time/skills perspective. <blockquote>... [Dr. Michael] Murphy of ScribeAmerica estimates that doctors can see eight additional patients over a 10-hour shift, hiking Medicare revenues alone by $91 an hour. The companies that develop and sell electronic medical records systems are "in total denial" about how complicated they are for doctors to use, [Dr. David] Strumpf said. "They know these systems need scribes," he said. "They work with us to train our scribes on their systems, but they don't want to be public about it."</blockquote> (One wonders how much in "denial" the companies are and just who is truly in denial; after all, purchase of these systems just became a governmental priority.) Here, of course, is the major drawback to scribes: money. Scribes "typically cost $20 to $26 an hour" today, and that number is likely to rise. While the article's contributors maintain that physicians can boost their revenues by "$50 to $60 an hour" using scribes, I wonder if the overall economic impact of the generalized use of tens or hundreds of thousands of EMR scribes would be in the "wrong" direction (i.e., from the payor and government perspective). The billions spent on EMR's were supposed to reduce the costs of healthcare, not increase the expenses associated with it. I also wonder what could happen when a scribe is not available. <blockquote>At the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, Va., emergency room physicians can complete electronic charts just as fast as scribes, most of whom are pre-med students at UVA. But doctors would rebel if the scribes disappeared, said Dr. Robert Reiser, medical director of the scribe program, which the university runs itself. </blockquote> Sept. 10 Addendum: See an interesting financial analysis by Doug Perednia <a href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/11/scribes-lead-unintended-consequences-electronic-medical-records.html">here</a>. -- SS </div></div>

The Ultimate Workaround To Mission Hostile Health IT: Humans (a.k.a. "Scribes")

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic doctor. Dr. Data will be that doctor; better worse than he was before. Better, strong…

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