The cost of training a scribe to work in an Emergency Department

What is it about?

Scribes can help Emergency Physicians to be more productive by undertaking their clerical work for them. This is the first evaluation of how much it costs to train a scribe to competency. It includes all costs, including start-up, equipment, training, productivity of trainers during clinical training, salaries and education. This is the only paper to measure these costs to date. The knowledge about training scribes is usually held confidentially by commercial scribe provider companies.

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Why is it important?

This information is important as most evaluations of the cost-benefits of scribes exclude training costs and are therefore incomplete, particularly when there is very high turn-over of staff due to the natural career progression of scribes (they obtain places in medical school). With this information, physicians can now determine if they should initiate a scribe program at their facility, and if so, what upfront costs they will encounter. It should allow them to generate an accurate business plan and then determine what productivity gains scribes need to provide in order for a program to break even. The article also provides evidence that when a physician takes on a scribe trainee, they don't gain any productivity during the clinical training time, but they don't lose any productivity either. Whilst they may feel slower with their scribe apprentice, the physician actually works at the same rate and should enjoy the presence of the brand new health professional at the start of their career, rather than being stressed by the training load.

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