Derek Leiner’s workplace is densely packed with the latest technology.
At the University of Virginia Medical Center’s emergency room, doctors have access to electrocardiogram machines and bedside ultrasounds and are just steps away from a CT scanner and MRI machine.
Yet Leiner’s job title harks back to the days of the pharaohs.
He’s a scribe.
“When I tell my friends I’m a scribe, they ask me if I use a quill,” says Leiner, 22, a University of Virginia graduate who plans to apply to medical school.
Instead of pens, scribes here use laptops as they trail doctors from bed to bed, taking detailed notes that will form part of each patient’s electronic medical record. Experts say the scribes’ peculiar role — with one foot in 2009 and one in 2000 B.C. — illustrates hospitals’ often bumpy transition from clipboards and closets of paper charts to digital records.
While most other businesses scrapped their paper files decades ago, hospitals have lagged. Several of the health reform proposals being considered in Congress would push the industry to convert to electronic records, says Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health.
“Most doctors and hospitals are in the olden days,” he says. “In the average physician’s practice, you are still going to see closets full of paper charts.”
A Financial Incentive To Switch
Congress dedicated $30 billion of the economic stimulus package to help hospitals and doctors create electronic records, Jha says. That investment should save the country $10 billion over time, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Doctors and hospitals who convert to electronic records can receive bonus payments from Medicare and Medicaid beginning in 2011; those who aren’t using them by 2015 will face penalties.
Today, only 1.5 percent of hospitals have a “comprehensive” electronic health record, and 8 percent have a basic version, according to Jha’s March study in…