Medical scribes: How do their notes stack up?

Objective Medical scribes are increasingly employed to improve physician efficiency with regard to the electronic medical record (EMR). The impact of scribes on the quality of outpatient visit notes is not known. To assess the effect, we conducted a retrospective review of ambulatory progress notes written before and after 8 practice sites transitioned to the use of medical assistants as scribes. Methods The Physician Documentation Quality Instrument 9 (PDQI-9) was used to compare the quality of outpatient progress notes written by medical assistant scribes with the quality of notes written by 18 primary care physicians working without a scribe. The notes pertained to diabetes encounters and same-day appointments and were written during the 3 to 6 months preceding the use of scribes (pre-scribe period) and the 3 to 6 months after scribes were employed (scribe period). Results One hundred eight notes from the pre-scribe period and 109 from the scribe period were reviewed. Scribed notes were rated higher in overall quality than unscribed notes (mean total PDQI-9 score 30.3 for scribed notes vs 28.9 for nonscribed notes; P=.01) and more up-to-date, thorough, useful, and comprehensible. The differences were limited to diabetes encounters. For same-day appointments, scribed and nonscribed notes did not differ in quality. The total word count of all scribed and nonscribed notes was similar (mean words 618, standard deviation (SD) 273 for scribed notes vs 558 words, SD 289 for nonscribed notes; P=.12). Conclusions In this retrospective review, ambulatory notes were of higher quality when medical assistants acted as scribes than when physicians wrote them alone, at least for diabetes visits. Our findings may not apply to professional scribes who are not part of the clinical care team. As the use of medical scribes expands, additional studies should examine the impact of scribes on other aspects of care quality.