The rise of the medical scribe industry: implications for the advancement of electronic health records.
The use of medical scribes to enter information into electronic health records has been adopted as a strategy to shift the burden of documentation away from the clinician. This commentary describes how the practice of employing scribes could lead to insufficient interpretation of clinical information and alerts when actions are recorded in the computerized provider order entry systems by nonclinician workers. This workaround may reduce the demand for needed improvements in health information technology and result in potential hazards to patient safety.