Virtual Medical Scribe

Documentation, data collection, and managing the EHR database are some of the important yet tedious tasks that every healthcare practitioner must conduct. Due to their sensitive nature, most of the time, medical professionals need to handle these tasks. However, such tasks can easily distract the professionals and collide with their primary task, providing healthcare.

So, how can you focus on offering the best healthcare and performing these time-consuming tasks without being overwhelmed?

Easy; you hire a virtual medical scribe and delegate the tasks. While your remote professional scribe takes care of documentation, you put your best efforts into delivering high-quality medical care.

In this article, we will discuss virtual medical scribe services, what these professionals do, their skills and qualifications, and where you can hire them. Let’s bring the big gun for your practice.

What is a Virtual Medical Scribe?

Virtual medical scribes, or VMSs, are professional experts at taking notes and documenting while patients visit your medical practices while living miles apart. These professionals keep detailed documents of patient visits and manage the EHR database to access necessary information without hassle.

In general, remote medical scribes use different telecommunication methods, like audio calls or video calls (same as medical virtual assistants) to record doctor-patient interactions for future reference. They will note down the important aspects of those interactions and use them to update the patient database.

How Does the Virtual Medical Scribing Process Work?

Medical Scribing is an important aspect of EHR documentation which can take 40% of your time as a medical practitioner. This process consists of documenting and charting the actions and words of a medical practitioner. A virtual medical scribe performs all those tasks using a HIPAA-authorized communication channel through audio or video calls.

Here are the stages of how your VMS will handle the scribing process:

Before the Arrival of the Patient:

• Gather the medical history of the patient if it’s a follow-up visit
• Document the reason for the visit
• Review the patient’s previous medical records
• Record any other relevant information that could be essential for diagnosis

Once the Patient Arrives:

• Listening to the doctor-patient interaction through a HIPAA-compliant, secure audio or video connection
• Register the patient’s information and medical history in real-time
• Note down the medical practitioner’s diagnosis and treatment plan

After the Patient Leaves:

• Reviewing and updating the patient’s EHR
• Keep the medical professional informed about the necessary follow-up information
• If there is any missing information, the VA won’t disrupt the conversation; instead, ask after the patient leave

Tasks Your Virtual Medical Scribe Performs for Your Practice

As mentioned earlier, the responsibility of an online medical scribe revolves around documenting and managing patient information. This assistance effectively reduces the clerical workload for healthcare professionals.

Additionally, you can delegate medical coding and billing tasks along with legal and regulatory compliance to your virtual scribe, if you were clear about this responsibility in the job description. They will make sure all these tasks are completed accurately.

Let’s take a look at these tasks in a brief:

Patient Visit Documentation

A remote healthcare scribe keeps track of all the patients arriving at your medical practice. Once patients make an appointment, the scribe will be ready to take notes and update EHR form on that particular time.

During the conversation between the patient and doctor, the VA scribe fill up the EHR forms with all relevant and important informations. If the patient is coming for followup session, then he will update the EHR form.
Next, when the doctor requests to know the health problem the patient mentioned, the VA delivers the notes to the healthcare practitioner. All of the documentation on patient visits will help the medical practitioner diagnose the illness.

Recording Information

Once your online scribe gathers all the relevant information about the patient and does medical transcription, they will start updating the EHR database. Electronic health records (EHR) contain all the previous diagnoses and current symptoms the patients are suffering from. They also record progress notes, discharge summaries, clinical abstracts, and operative reports.

As a result, healthcare professionals can be more prepared and informed about the whole situation.

Use EMR, EHR Softwares & VR Glasses

To meet your needs, the VA may use various EHR systems, such as eCW, Practice Fusion, EPIC, NextGen, Athenanet, or others.

The virtual assistant (VA) accompanies you in the exam room, recording detailed information into the electronic medical record (EMR) tools using a laptop or computer designed for clinic staff. Through secure online platforms, our scribes can listen to and observe patient-physician interactions, documenting everything in real-time directly into your electronic health record (EHR) or EMR software.

To enhance their documentation process, virtual medical scribes can use VR glasses. By wearing VR glasses, scribes can immerse themselves in the exam room environment, experiencing the interaction between the healthcare provider and the patient as if they were physically present. Thus, they can capture detailed and accurate notes in real-time, documenting everything that happens during the visit.

The VR setup can also display relevant patient information, lab results, and previous medical history. Additionally, VR glasses can help reduce distractions and keep the scribe focused on the conversation. Overall, using VR technology makes the documentation process more efficient and precise.

Proofread Medical Translation

Revising or proofreading medical translations is more like a medical transcription task, but on your demand, the medical virtual scribe may do that, too. They may proofread your important medical documents and other technical medical or health-related terminology. By doing these, the VA provides accurate information without any mistakes.

Pre-chart the Notes

Virtual scribes help the workflow by pre-charting notes for the next day’s clinic, which saves providers time. The scribe also documents all parts of the note, like the history of the present illness (HPI), review of systems (ROS), physical exam (PE), and the assessment and plan.

They prepare everything in advance, including reviewing old notes and lab results so that the provider can focus on the patient during the visit.

They can also enter patient instructions, capture length of stay with the provider’s input, create letters for patients, and send notes to referring physicians. Plus, they can pend most computerized physician order entry (CPOE) tasks for the physician to review and send once the note is signed.

HIPAA Compliance

The main issue most online scribes have faced is finding a foolproof way to record medical data while maintaining the utmost secrecy mentioned in the HIPAA. However, nowadays, online tools are approved by HIPAA. As a result, every medical scribe working remotely can perform their task conveniently while maintaining all HIPAA compliance.

Assisting Patient Flow

Medical professionals used to consume a huge proportion of their time scribing their interactions with patients. Thus, they struggled to cope with the patient flow and had to reschedule appointments. With the help of a dedicated remote scribe, doctors, nurses, and other medicare professionals can now easily keep up with patient flow effectively.

While medical professionals deal with patient flow, online scribes take care of the scribing, giving the healthcare workers flexibility and effective time management ability.

Handle Medical Provider Requests

The virtual scribes also carefully research any information that a medical provider requests and respond to messages and questions from the doctor regarding the patient in question.

Moreover, the VAs also handle requests from other medical providers efficiently. They serve as a direct line of communication between healthcare providers and the administrative staff. The remote scribe assistant ensures that all requests are addressed. This includes entering orders for lab tests or imaging and relaying instructions to other team members.

Inbox Management

Another important task your virtual healthcare scribe services include is managing your inbox. They keep track of your emails, social media inboxes, and other medical platform inboxes to gather patient information who have reached out to your practice.

Your online professional will send effective messages to the patient to get the full picture of the patient’s situation. Therefore, you will be able to invest more time in patient care and enhance your expertise.

Address Onsite Scribes Shortage

For effective patient care, most healthcare practices hire scribes to help the caregivers. However, if there is an overflow of patients, there may not be enough scribes available. In such cases, online scribes can effectively take over the scribing task and give medical professionals a hand in completing their day-to-day tasks effectively.

Catering Patient Privacy

Healthcare information is quite personal and sensitive for patients. That is why there are strict guidelines about doctor-patient confidentiality. However, patients tend to be shy or escapist while providing medical information to doctors.

A remote scribe will assure them their privacy will be maintained.

Also, the computer screens must not be intentionally or unintentionally visible to anyone other than the scribe. The scribe can only interact with the doctor, not the patient.

Emergency Room Scribe

Emergency room scribes are trained professionals who have the skill to note down all the important details from doctor-patient interactions in the emergency room.

Emergency room situations are often unpredictable and crucial due to their delicate nature. Without proper medical documentation, your practice can be subject to hefty fines and expensive lawsuits. With the help of an online emergency room scribe, you can effectively avoid such consequences.

Here, the virtual medical scribes may use AI in emergency rooms in several helpful ways. They can automatically transcribe conversations between healthcare providers and patients to capture important information quickly. AI also helps retrieve relevant patient history and lab results, giving scribes the context they need during visits. But this should be done under the agreement of the medical provider.

Outpatient Scribe

If you are running a private practice, like clinics or other private practices, you can employ a virtual clinical scribe to work alongside doctors during patient visits. These professionals will help you schedule appointments and follow-up visits rather than acute issues.

Qualifications and Skills Your Virtual Medical Scribe Should Have

To handle your healthcare practice’s day-to-day scribing tasks, your virtual scribe should have some necessary skills. These skills are usually related to handling technology, understanding medical procedures, and organizing tasks. Let’s take a quick look at them:

• Basic Computer Skills: All the scribing work your remote medical scribe handles is highly dependent on using a computer. Thus, if the remote professional is not proficient in handling a computer, they are not a good suit for your practice.
  Here, a point to be noted is that the network should be precise and strong, with a reliable internet setup for the virtual medical scribe; otherwise, they won’t be able to work efficiently.
• Fast and Accurate Typing Skills: The primary task a remote scribe needs to handle is to document and record patient data and interaction between the doctor and patient. Therefore, they must be proficient in fast and accurate typing of of 80 WPM.
• Medical Terminology Knowledge: Scribing patient data and interactions requires an excellent understanding of medical terminology. Thus, you need to make sure your virtual scribe is from a medical background.
• HIPAA Trained and Certified: HIPAA protects both healthcare professionals and patients from malpractice. So, during the hiring process of your online medical scribe, make sure they are HIPAA trained and certified.
• Organizational Skills: Last but not least, a remote scribe must have excellent organizational skills. Otherwise, they will struggle to record the necessary data, which will hamper your overall reputation.

Advantages of Subscribing for Remote Healthcare Scribe Service

Healthcare scribing has always been a complicated task that requires delicate handling. It took significant time and effort for medical practitioners to document patient interaction accurately. Which caused many of them to suffer from burnout. 

However, when you hire a virtual scribe service, you can give your doctors, nurses, and other relevant professionals much-needed relief. Here are the most significant advantages you can gain by subscribing to a remote medical scribe service:

• You can offer your patient better privacy and discuss freely about their sensitive health issues as your scribe documents this interaction from a remote location.
• By delegating the scribing tasks, medical professionals can focus solely on patient care,, which reduces physician burnout.
• Due to the remote nature of the job, you can access your suitable scribe professional for all your practices located in any location.
• As virtual healthcare scribes are seasoned professionals, they need minimal training and can easily integrate with your healthcare practice.
• Remote medical scribes can prioritize case-by-case and will use real-time communication to take immediate action in emergencies.
• Virtual scribe service allows you to have thorough, organised, and accurate patient-centred records and documentation which is invaluable in case of patient transfer and referrals.
• You can choose to have asynchronous or synchronous scribing, which helps you prepare charts in advance of labs post-visit as directed. In synchronous scribing, the virtual medical scribe documents the visit in real-time. Asynchronous scribing records the encounter using video or audio, which is then sent to the scribe for documentation afterward.
• Accuracy is crucial in documenting medical information, which your virtual scribe is expert in handling.
• Also, the virtual medical scribe is fixed for the doctor at a 1:1 ratio, which is not the same for the on-site scribe, as they change with shift changes.
• The scribe can take leave only when the doctor is on leave; otherwise, they are expected to be available. The virtual assistant provides a round-the-clock service to handle any patient-doctor transcription needs.
• Ordering tests can be quite complicated for a healthcare professional, which becomes significantly organized when you get an online scribe service
• 79% of physicians expressed their willingness to increase their patient volume when scribe service delegated, which, as a result, brought better ROI for the healthcare practice

Therefore, in light of such benefits, you should highly consider hiring a suitable and expert virtual medical scribe service.

Where Can You Hire the Virtual Medical Scribe Service for Your Practice?

Virtual medical patient scribes are not very hard to find. However, being sure of their expertise can be quite a struggle. With the influx of online medical scribe services on numerous websites, making an informed decision is now more crucial than ever.

Thus, when you are trying to find your online medical scribe service, look for professional websites like YesAssistant which has significant experience in providing such services. YesAssistant has a decade of reputation for offering remote healthcare scribes in reputed healthcare practices.

All our clients are content with our services and have scaled up as their practice grows. Our professionals handle all the patient interactions with the utmost care and maintain all the HIPAA regulations. As a result, our services have been ideal for many other similar service providers.

No matter if you are looking for a medical billing virtual assistant or a remote medical scribe service, contact us now! Our professional will walk you through our services and answer all your questions. You can also subscribe for our no-commitment free trial period as well to see how our services can help your medical practice be efficient and offer a better experience for your patients.

Book an Appointment Today for Further Discussion