Influence of Scribes on Patient-Physician Communication in Primary Care Encounters: Mixed Methods Study

With the increasing adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems, documentation-related burdens have been increasing for health care providers. Recent estimates indicate that primary care providers spend about one-half of their workdays interacting with the EHR, of which about half is focused on clerical tasks. To reduce documentation burdens associated with the EHR, health care systems and physician practices are increasingly implementing medical scribes to assist providers with real-time documentation. Scribes are typically unlicensed paraprofessionals who assist health care providers by documenting notes electronically under the direction of a licensed practitioner or physician in real time. Despite the promise of scribes, few studies have investigated their effect on clinical encounters, particularly with regard to patient-provider communication.

The purpose of this quasi-experimental pilot study was to understand how scribes affect patient-physician communication in primary care clinical encounters.

We employed a convergent mixed methods design and included a sample of three physician-scribe pairs and 34 patients. Patients' clinical encounters were randomly assigned to a scribe or nonscribe group. We conducted patient surveys focused on perceptions of patient-provider communication and satisfaction with encounters, video recorded clinical encounters, and conducted physician interviews about their experiences with scribes.

Overall, the survey results revealed that patients across both arms reported very high satisfaction of communication with their physician, their physician's use of the EHR, and their care, with very little variability. Video recording analysis supported patient survey data by demonstrating high measures of communication among physicians in both scribed and nonscribed encounters. Furthermore, video recordings revealed that the presence of scribes had very little effect on the clinical encounter.

From the patient's perspective, scribes are an acceptable addition to clinical encounters. Although they do not have much impact on patients' perceptions of satisfaction and their impact on the clinical encounter itself was minimal, their potential to reduce documentation-related burden on physicians is valuable. Physicians noted important issues related to scribes, including important considerations for implementing scribe programs, the role of scribes in patient interactions, how physicians work with scribes, characteristics of good scribes, and the role of scribes in physician workflow.