Medical scribes are one of the best ways to combat provider burnout and improve care team morale. But between a third-party provider solution, or your own homegrown, in-house medical scribe solution, how do you determine what is the best scribe solution available to you?
We understand that every provider is different. You may have needs for dozens of scribes to help physicians across multiple locations and specialties. Or you have already hired and trained scribes but need a better way to manage their growth and hours. Maybe you’re a small clinic located in an area where scribe recruitment and retention is difficult. There is no single scribe “solution” that fits all the molds. Below are some pluses and minuses of each scribing model, from a third-party documentation assistance provider, to home-grown, in-house scribes, to ScribeConnect’s hybrid models.
Third-party medical providers, such as the full turn-key service ScribeConnect offers, is a great way to hire trained, certified, and qualified medical scribes to fill your documentation needs immediately. If you’re in a metropolitan area or operate close to a college with a strong medical school or pre-med program, you have access to a large pool of medical scribes as offered by third-party providers that operate across the nation like us. In most cases, the scribes are paid by the third-party provider, and the associated administrative work, such as payroll, benefits, employer responsible taxes, etc, are handled by the provider. All you are responsible for are to onboard the program, and enjoy the documentation support and alleviate your clinician’s workload. All with a simple payment structure per scribe plus, most of the time, a fixed or recurring fee.
Third-party scribe providers are ideal for larger health systems, with the need for multiple shifts of scribes covering busy departments at one or multiple facilities. Typically located near an urban center or near colleges that provide a pool of qualified candidates, with a sizable operating budget to cover the additional overhead of hiring outside scribes, and a reduced human resources staff that can appreciate the reduced HR overhead a third-party provides.
As a third-party medical scribe provider ourselves, ScribeConnect fully understands and appreciates that not all organizations are alike. There are plenty of scenarios where an in-house scribe program may be a better solution. For example, if you’re a small provider, or a group of providers operating in a remote area where there just isn’t a huge pool of applicants waiting and ready to tackle medical scribing as a career, and a remote scribing or dictation service just isn’t appealing. Or you may have had experience with a third-party scribe provider and don’t like the constant turn-over, since the pool of talented scribes tends to move on to medical school or other healthcare industry careers.
When you procure your own scribes, your physicians and scribes can develop a working relationship that can improve documentation efficiency over time. You don’t need to retrain a scribe every 6 months to a year when they decide to go back to school. As an organization, you have a much more vested employee in an in-house hire, without third-party operation and the fixed or recurring cost that comes with implementing an outside scribe program. Best of all, you can pay your medical scribe more from the money you save, thus increasing both your physician and scribe’s satisfaction and improving their quality of life, leading to decreased staff turnover rate.
At ScribeConnect, we recognize that there are valid reasons for both solutions, and as a leading provider of scribe services and scribe training courses for nearly a decade, we can offer solutions that help your organization regardless of size, location, and budget. We have turnkey solutions ready to help with healthcare organizations’ documentation needs that can be rolled out immediately. See the attached PDF for the 5 reasons why ScribeConnect is the right provider for you.
However, if your organization needs in-house scribes, we also have the resources to help you hire, train, and retain your scribes and get your scribe program kicked off. We provide a comprehensive list of courses to help your scribe get trained, certified, and continue their education. Along with a list of medical specialty courses to help you in a variety of different medical disciplines. These courses are offered as a la carte courses, so you pay for what your in-house scribe needs.
Or, if you plan on hiring multiple in-house scribes, and want to manage their on-going training and education, as well as manage the hiring process and oversee their assigned learning tasks, help with onboarding, and hire from a pool of qualified and certified scribes, the ScribeConnect platform gives you full access to all the courses at all times, and offers you a centralized, SaaS-based platform to make it easy to get your in-house scribe program started, or maintain your in-house program if you already have scribes on staff.
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