To Free Doctors from Computers, Far-Flung Scribes Are Now Taking Notes for Them

October 2, 2020

(Kaiser Health News) – Medical scribes first appeared in the 1970s as note takers for emergency room physicians. But the practice took off after 2009, when the federal HITECH Act incentivized health care providers to adopt EHRs. These were supposed to simplify patient record-keeping, but instead they generated a need for scribes. Doctors find entering notes and data into poorly designed EHR software cumbersome and time-consuming. So scribing is a fast-growing field in the U.S., with the workforce expanding from 15,000 in 2015 to an estimated 100,000 this year.