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Medical scribes have come a long way since they first appeared as notetakers for Emergency Room clinicians in the 1970s. Today, an estimated 100,000 medical scribes work alongside providers and patients in the U.S. alone.The good news is that scribes successfully optimize health information management workflows and reduce administrative burdens. The bad news is that hiring your own team of in-person scribes can be prohibitively expensive. Just one scribe can cost as much as $50,000 per year. And with skyrocketing labor costs pinching the margins and profits of health systems, hospitals, and physician groups right now, few organizations can afford to add to their current headcount.Fortunately, there is a path forward: virtual medical scribes. These highly trained experts work remotely. They connect with providers and patients using the best-in-class technology. And they’re available when your providers need them the most. Let’s look at 8 benefits of virtual medical scribing and explore how scribing redefines the way patient encounters are documented today.1. Reduced provider burnout Right now, providers spent about 1.84 hours a day beyond regular work hours completing their EHR documentation, according to a recent JAMA Internal Medicine report. Expand that over a five-day workweek and physicians average 9.2 hours of overtime per week solely on documentation.This is contributing to soaring rates of physician burnout, which increased from 42% five years ago to 53% in 2023. The No. 1 cause of burnout: Having too many bureaucratic tasks, which was mentioned by 61% of physicians who self-reported burnout in Medscape’s Physician Burnout &amp; Depression Report 2023.Medical scribes are proven to ease providers’ documentation challenges, reduce burnout, and increase provider engagement. Physicians surveyed in a study published in JAMA Dermatology offered a 3.6 average response (on a scale of 1 to 4, 4 being the highest) to the question, “using a scribe has increased my job satisfaction.”2. Ability to choose the way you scribe Advances in technology give providers new options when it comes to virtual scribing. The DeliverHealth platform, for example, lets physicians choose between synchronous (in real time) and asynchronous (after the fact) scribing.What’s the difference? With asynchronous scribing, a provider places their mobile device between them and the patient and records the encounter. Then, with the tap of a button in the eSOne app, the provider sends the recording off to a highly trained medical scribe, who completes the transcript and uploads it into the EHR of record.Synchronous scribing raises the bar, bringing the virtual scribe directly into the patient room. Providers can speak with the scribe as needed. Scribes complete documentation during the encounter, so as soon as the patient visit ends, documentation is complete. That means no extra hours for physicians and no interruption in patient care.Both methods bring multiple benefits. Asynchronous scribing improves an organization’s overall HIM workflow and saves providers time. Synchronous scribing does the same. What’s more, with synchronous scribing, you can have virtual scribes prepare charts in advance or order labs post-visit as directed by the physician.3. Flexibility to use any device Synchronous scribing through DeliverHealth gives providers the greatest flexibility when it comes to virtual scribing. Providers can use a web browser on whatever device they choose—PC, Mac, iPad, Android, tablet—to complete their documentation. That means your organization already has the technology you need to reap all the benefits of virtual scribing.4. Control over who’s in the exam room While medical scribes first became widely used in ER settings, today they bring value to multiple practice locations. But there are times when a provider or patient may wish to not have a scribe in the room with them—physically or virtually. This can be especially true in settings like OB/GYN and urology practices, where sensitive medical situations are routinely discussed between providers and patients.Providers who choose virtual scribing on the DeliverHealth platform get full control over who is with the room and who is not in the room. With the tap of a button, they can include or exclude a scribe to ensure confidentiality and enhance patient comfort and satisfaction. Providers can also choose whether to use video and audio, video-only, or audio-only, on the platform.5. Increased accuracy The quality of documentation you get from a virtual medical scribe comes down to the quality of the recording. The DeliverHealth platform includes a multiuser speech recognition voice module that allows the scribe, patient, provider to talk simultaneously without missing a single spoken word. This technology makes it easy for the scribe to identify every distinct voice within a patient encounter, leading to more accurate documentation.6. Faster turnaround times The days of waiting for documentation 24 or 48 hours—or even longer—after a patient encounter should be in the rearview mirror for good. With synchronous medical scribing, documentation is instantaneous. With asynchronous medical scribing, documentation is complete within two to four hours after a patient encounter.7. Greater focus on direct patient care Several studies show that medical scribes allow providers to focus entirely on the patient and spend less time distracted by entering medical information into a computer. One study indicates that 57% of patients said physicians spent less time than usual on their computer during a scribe-assisted visit, and almost half of patients said their doctor spent more time speaking directly with them.With virtual scribing, providers don’t have to spend any time entering data into their desktop or mobile device. They simply select a patient’s name on their schedule using the eSOne app, press record, and the scribe does the rest. That gives providers even more time to focus on what matters most—patient care.8. Positive ROI Seventy-nine percent of physicians in the JAMA Dermatology study said that the use of in-person scribes made them more willing to increase their patient volume. Further, the use of scribes increased practice revenue by 7.7% in one quarter. Now, imagine how many more patients your organization can see—or how much you can impact your margins—with virtual scribing.<h2>Leverage virtual medical scribing benefits for your organization—and your patients</h2>If you choose DeliverHealth for virtual scribing, you’ll stand to gain even more medical scribing benefits. We combine our best-in-class platform with the “human in the loop”—high-quality medical scribes who are trained to work directly in your EHR of choice.

8 Benefits of Virtual Medical Scribing

Nearly all medical scribing software on the market today promises to help healthcare providers spend less time on paperwork, more time with patients, and optimize revenue cycle management. But how many of them really deliver on those promises?To help you find the answer, we’re exploring nine of the questions that we hear most frequently from physician practices, outpatient groups, and urgent care centers regarding AI-driven medical documentation. Read on to learn how DeliverHealth, one of the leading vendors for clinical documentation improvement, provides advanced software and services to automate and enhance documentation processes.1. Will it meet my providers’ personal documentation preferences? Many solutions lock healthcare professionals into a single form of documentation method. That’s great if all your providers wanted to use AI medical scribes, for example. But how often do providers across the board agree on the type of documentation method they want to use?The reality is that providers want flexible options that help to make medical documentation as convenient and simple as possible. They want to choose between AI medical scribing—either in real time (synchronous) or after the fact (asynchronous)—or dictation based on their specific needs in the moment.The DeliverHealth Platform stands out as the only healthcare AI solution that lets providers toggle seamlessly between both synchronous and asynchronous medical scribing and dictation with the tap of a finger. Learn more about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous scribing.2. Are the workflows easy to use? When it comes to medical documentation, providers crave simplicity. They don’t want to learn different workflows for transcribing or scribing. DeliverHealth's eSOne is the only medical scribing solution on the market that uses the same workflow and platform for both methods of documentation.Providers just log into eSOne, choose the patient’s name from the schedule, select a documentation method, and get started. It really is that simple.3. What happens if Wi-Fi goes down? In too many instances, all the potential efficiencies of clinical documentation solutions vanish once a Wi-Fi signal is lost. But that’s not the case with DeliverHealth. Because eSOne is not dependent upon Wi-Fi, providers won’t have to worry about losing their connection in the middle of a patient encounter or procedure. What’s more, our solution lives within Microsoft Azure, a multi-tenant, cloud-based environment with deep security protocols, offering maximum protection for patient data.4. Will I need additional technology or hardware? You will if you choose other documentation solutions. But with DeliverHealth, everything you need is already included in eSOne.5. How much will it accelerate my revenue cycle? Turnaround time is one of the biggest factors in a healthcare organization’s ability to capture revenue efficiently. When documentation solutions are too complicated, turnaround time slows down. When they’re simplified, revenue cycles accelerate.To make the best choice for your organization, ask a vendor about their turnaround times. With synchronous scribing through DeliverHealth, charts are completed and available for a provider to review and sign off on by the end of the day. With asynchronous scribing, turnaround times on the DeliverHealth platform average 3.35 hours, with an average encounter length of 13.4 minutes.6. Will it work with my EHR? Like other healthcare solutions, DeliverHealth can integrate with any EHR. Our highly trained scribes can work directly in providers' EHRs to complete the note for providers to review and sign-off.7. Will it help solve my pain points? Research shows that AI medical scribes allow clinicians to spend 75% of their time on direct clinical interaction and less than 25% on EHR tasks. Without scribes, providers spend more time (nearly 49%) on EHR tasks and less time (33%) on direct clinical interaction.In addition, medical scribing with DeliverHealth allows clinicians to focus on the patient, improve chart accuracy, and enhance MIPS protocol documentation. It helps facilities capture all earned reimbursement, improve patient satisfaction scores, and maximize the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of patient care. And it helps give patients more focused interaction with their clinicians.8. Is it proven? DeliverHealth’s clinical documentation expertise goes back to the Dictaphone. We have 20 years of at-the-elbows experience in medical documentation, outsourcing, and staff augmentation, making us uniquely qualified to support the unique needs of clinicians, facilities, and patients.Take a closer look at clinical documentation and AI medical scribing When is the right time for HIM directors, EHR directors, or practice administrators to compare documentation solutions and explore how they can help their specific needs? Telltale signs include quality and coverage issues, clinician burnout, missing or incomplete documentation, and lower reimbursement.If you see any of these signs, reach out to a clinical documentation improvement software vendor who is willing to engage in a meaningful conversation with you. Bring them your toughest challenges and ask how they can help you solve them.

AI Medical Scribing Software: How DeliverHealth Stacks Up

Meet Dr. Khan and Dr. Thomas. They’re both orthopedic surgeons. They both juggle a busy schedule of office visits and surgeries. They both work for the same provider group.But here’s a key difference: Dr. Khan prefers to use asynchronous medical scribing to document her patient encounters. Dr. Thomas prefers synchronous scribing.Which type of medical scribing is better? The answer comes down to individual physician preference. Which is why the best approach is to give providers a choice of either-or.Let’s explore synchronous and asynchronous medical scribing, unpack the differences between both options, and learn the many benefits that scribes bring to health systems, outpatient groups, and urgent care centers.<h2>What is Synchronous Scribing? </h2>Synchronous essentially means “in real time.” So, with synchronous scribing, a highly trained medical scribe completes documentation as the patient encounter happens. The scribe may physically stand in the room with the patient and clinician, or they may connect to the exam virtually through a desktop, laptop, or mobile device. As the visit occurs, the scribe listens to the patient encounter in real time and inputs the required documentation.Pros:Providers can offer immediate feedback and correction to the scribe in the moment. Providers can review and sign off on orders—including labs, prescriptions, and radiology—in real time, before the patient reaches the pharmacy, radiology, or diagnostic center. Clinicians spend less time on documentation at the end of their patient schedule. Cons:Another human (or voice) in the room may be distracting and could interrupt the flow of the patient-provider visit. But you can overcome this challenge by using virtual synchronous medical scribing on the DeliverHealth Platform. Simply “mute” the scribe during the patient encounter. Then, if you have any feedback for the scribe, you can share it immediately after the visit. &nbsp;<h2>What is asynchronous scribing? </h2>In asynchronous scribing, patient encounters are recorded in real time using audio, video, or both. The recording is then sent to a highly trained medical scribe who completes documentation after the fact. The scribe inputs a structure note into the EHR and asks the clinician to review and sign off on the note.Pros:Allows clinician to focus on the patient without distractions during an encounter. Eases physician documentation burden; clinicians need only to sign off on the note once it’s complete. Cons:Providers can’t offer instant feedback to scribe. Providers can’t sign off on prescriptions—or lab or radiology orders—in real time. &nbsp;<h2>Synchronous or Asynchronous—which is better?</h2>In reality, neither synchronous nor asynchronous medical scribing is “better.” They’re both highly effective and efficient ways to perform medical documentation. They also both bring many tangible benefits to providers and facilities, including:Higher-quality patient care. Scribing of any kind is proven to help clinicians spend more time with their patients and less time on EHR tasks. This leads to higher-quality patient visits, which also creates the downstream benefits of more efficient and effective care.More accurate documentation. Because a certified medical scribe handles documentation, organizations benefit from improved chart accuracy and thoroughness.Improved satisfaction scores. Medical scribing—virtual and in-person—can help boost patients’ satisfaction levels with their providers. It also can help health systems, provider groups, and urgent care centers retain their most trusted providers because it lessens their administrative burden.Uninterrupted patient flow. Providers don’t have to stop a patient mid-sentence to jot down a note. The scribe handles all notetaking so providers and patients can have more meaningful discussions.Improved revenue capture. Medical scribing ensures that patient records stay up to date, reduces the risk of errors, and accelerates turnaround time, allowing facilities to optimize their billing and coding functions.Cost savings. Because scribing can simplify practice workflows, it’s a cost-effective way to drive efficiency, especially in busy medical practices and urgent care centers.Less burnout. With scribes handling documentation, clinicians can enjoy an improved work-life balance. <h2>Why Choose DeliverHealth for Synchronous and Asynchronous Scribing.</h2>The DeliverHealth Platform—the most powerful HIM platform in the industry—now offers both synchronous and asynchronous medical scribing. That means your providers can choose the option they want to use, on their schedule and their terms.Our platform is quick to set up and easy to use. It integrates with your providers’ patient schedules. So, clinicians need only to select the patient’s name from their daily schedule and request their preferred medical scribe virtually.Clinicians can also use the DeliverHealth Platform to access multiple other services—including dictation —using the same familiar workflow. And since you can use our solution on any smart device in the palm of your hand, you’ll be connected anywhere at any time.<h2>How do I Know if Medical Scribing Can Help My Facility?</h2>Ask yourself—and your providers—a few key questions. How is your organization completing its documentation? How much time is spent reviewing and correcting notes? When do your providers sign off on notes? Are you experiencing any issues with quality, coverage, backlog, or clinician burnout.Once you have the answers, use them to determine the best nest step for your healthcare organization.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Medical Scribing: What’s the Difference?

Healthcare organizations, we have a denials problem. And it’s getting worse by the day.The cost of medical claim denials increased by a whopping 67% in 2022, according to a benchmarking analysis reported by HealthLeaders Media. The average health system experienced 110,000 claims denials last year alone.While roughly 11% of all claims were denied—up nearly 8% from 2021—all regions aren’t created equal. In the Pacific U.S., for example, denial rates hit a staggering 17% of all claims, according to data from Change Healthcare.What’s the cause? Rules from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) keep getting more complicated. Payers often have their own rules that don’t match up to CMS’ regulations. And most hospitals, health systems, and physician practices are so short on staff, they don’t even have the time to review their denied claimsAs a result, denials have reached epidemic proportions. And they’re costing you money—lots of it! The HealthLeaders article reported that denials cost healthcare organizations 2.5% of their gross revenue in August 2022 alone.Solving the denials crisis isn’t going to be easy. But with the right processes, people, and technology, organizations can take their Denials Management capabilities from reactive to proactive. <h2>Processes: Strengthen Your Physician Education Efforts</h2>Missing and low-quality documentation continue to be common root causes of denials. Documentation must support all aspects of coding and billing. That’s why it’s crucial for healthcare organizations to re-focus on clinician education programs, especially given the continuous changes to facility and professional coding systems and billing rules.The last few years have brought unprecedented stress to providers and resulted in very little time for education. But this has resulted in a lack of focus on feedback and education related to documentation and coding. This has caused a lack of awareness of important documentation compliance changes. This has created added stress in the middle- and back-end of the revenue cycle.With denials on the rise, organizations must reengage their providers immediately. One tip: Consider holding training sessions inside the physicians’ office so they can fully engage and not feel as if they’re pulled away from their work.<h2>People: Leverage Medical Scribes</h2>Your clinicians are already incredibly busy. And the reality is that they’ll always struggle to balance the time they spend on documentation with the time they spend on direct patient care. But adding medical scribes can help organizations bridge that gap and boost provider satisfaction.Scribes focus 100% on documentation. That gives clinicians more time to focus on patient care and may lower physician burnout rates. Scribes are a great fit for organizations that are seeing increased denials due to missed documentation, chart completion backlogs, or lengthy delays in billing and reimbursement.You don’t necessarily have to increase your organization’s headcount to take advantage of scribing. With virtual medical scribing from DeliverHealth, clinicians can access a trained scribe remotely from their iPhone. The scribe will listen to a patient encounter in real time, create a structured note, and upload it to your EHR. All the provider needs to do is review the note and sign off on it after the encounter.<h2>Technology: Use Analytics to Track &amp; Reduce Denial Rates</h2>The late Peter Drucker, a visionary management consultant, is known for having said, “What gets measured gets managed.” Yet a full two-thirds of healthcare organizations don’t even know their denial rate.This type of driving in the dark isn’t helping revenue cycle teams see clearly. To shed some light on the depth and breadth of the denials problem, organizations should invest in augmented intelligence-powered business analytics solutions.A few key data points your Denial Management System should track regularly include the number of denied cases, reasons for denials, denials by payers, and top DRGs, CPT, and ICD codes involved in denials.Many of today’s best-in-class coding solutions, such as those offered by DeliverHealth on the PerformPlatform, offer robust analytics that go far beyond what’s available within an organization’s EHR. They give you a real-time view of your organization’s coding successes and shortcomings so you can course-correct quickly and reduce revenue leakage.<h2>Go from Reactive to Proactive</h2>The evolution from a retrospective, audit-based approach to denials to a proactive Denials Management System won’t happen quickly for most organizations. But with so much at stake, there’s no time for delay.You can start your journey by assembling a cross-functional Denials Management System team. My colleague Nikki Bucceri, Senior Manager of Coding Solutions, explains who should be on that team—and what the team should look for—in this blog post.The sooner you begin to peel back the layers of the onion and shore up the processes, people, and technology behind medical claim denials, the faster you’ll regain lost revenue. Our team at DeliverHealth would love to help you get there. If you want to talk it out, email us and we’ll start the conversation.

Denials Are Costing You Money Right Now. Here’s How to Change That.

Automation is a natural for front-end revenue cycle tasks like co-payment collection and bill processing. So, why haven’t more organizations embraced automation where it matters most: in the middle of their revenue cycle?It’s a fair question. After all, most of today’s pressing revenue cycle management (RCM) troubles live smack dab in the center—specifically, with medical coding and audit. As denial rates soar and staffing shortages persist, organizations that take a fresh look at medical coding automation stand to gain the biggest benefits.Let’s take a look at 5 common mid-revenue cycle pain points and explore how automation can help to solve them. <h2>5 mid-revenue cycle challenges</h2>1. Labor shortages Recently, a Chief Financial Officer told me that medical coding and RCM is the most human-capital intense part of their organization’s entire revenue cycle. And that’s a serious problem at a time when patient volumes are rising and medical coding teams are shrinking.Historically, facilities looking to overcome medical coder shortages have turned to two sources: contract coders and RCM outsourcing providers. But each is fraught with additional peril. Contract coders can cost up to three times as much as in-house staff. And while the RCM outsourcing market is expected to grow to a record $23 billion by the end of 2023, most outsourcing companies have grown too large too fast and can’t keep up. This is creating quality issues.2. Interoperability With merger and acquisition activity continuing to run high, organizations are experiencing a myriad of interoperability roadblocks. Connecting systems remains difficult for even the savviest of hospital IT teams, and when an organization’s technologies can’t properly communicate and exchange data, it creates problems for medical coders, HIM leaders, and clinicians. One of the biggest challenges is that healthcare organizations must process huge amounts of unstructured data—images, notes, text files, and narrative interpretations. Believe it or not, we still typically see an 80%/20% split industry-wide between unstructured and structured data.3. Denials The average denial rate was up almost 12% in the first half of 2022, outpacing the rate of growth in both 2020 and 2019, according to Change Healthcare’s 2022 Revenue Cycle Denials Index. At the same time, rules from payers continue to get increasingly complicated. This puts a huge administrative burden on healthcare facilities and medical coding teams. As a matter of fact, someone in the HIM field told me recently that their team didn't even have time to address 90% of their denials.The reality is, denials are preventable, but HIM staff must have the time to review the denials, find the root cause, and stop the cycle.4. Claim edits On the surface, claim edits appear to help the mid-revenue cycle. When done correctly, they allow coding teams to generate cleaner claims before a bill is submitted. The downside: Custom edits are complex. They take tons of experience and lots of time to do them the right way, creating a potential burden on already overworked coding teams. And when edits are rushed or done improperly, they may cause more problems than they solve.5. Lack of analytics Electronic health records were supposed to solve this problem, right? Yet RCM leaders I talk to say they still experience a serious lack of visibility. That means they don’t have the data they need to drive effective change management across the mid-revenue cycle.But wait…there’s more. At physician-owned practices, sometimes providers end up coding their own cases. The problem: Most don’t have the time, knowledge, or experience to handle professional-fee coding. This pain point is exacerbated further by the fact that CMS has reduced the physician fee schedule conversion factor by 4.48% for 2023.<h2>Mid-revenue cycle pain points: How to solve them</h2>Most organizations don’t think twice about automating data collection, co-payment collection, and bill processing. But too many are ignoring the potential benefit of mid-revenue cycle automation.The reason: many facilities got stuck on computer-assisted coding (CAC), which never delivered on the promise of automation. There are still a lot of HIM leaders who don’t even know that anything better exists beyond CAC. And while some new CAC models have integrated more advanced technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) into their solutions, most are glorified PDF word searches that don’t make a medical coder’s job easier at all.To truly solve their mid-revenue cycle pain points, facilities must embrace both automation and analytics. This is where autonomous coding come into play. Today’s top solutions use sophisticated, next-generation algorithms to code charts within seconds, with zero human intervention, and proven high accuracy rates. Because these algorithms understand context and relevancy, autonomous coding engines know when it’s proper for a machine to handle coding, and when human intervention is necessary.And while some HIM leaders worry that autonomous coding will raise their error rates, we’ve found that the opposite is true. Autonomous coding on DeliverHealth’s PerformPlatform delivers 95% accuracy.Tech-enabled coding is a perfect fit for areas with high-volume, repetitive coding tasks, including radiology, emergency departments, urgent care, hospitalist medicine, and laboratories.When fully implemented, autonomous coding helps providers and facilities end their reliance on contract coders and focus their in-house staff on higher-value work. Autonomous coding also solves interoperability issues through its ability to code from both structured and unstructured data. It identifies patterns to help HIM teams find the root cause of denials. It reduces the need for complex claim edits.Plus, with the DeliverHealth PerformPlatform, facilities get quality analytics—such as percent automated, percent human coded, and time to bill—that they can use to drive real change.<h2>Start to ease your toughest coding pain points</h2>If you’re interested in mid-revenue cycle automation, start from the top. Outline your needs, goals, and objectives. Vet all technology and vendors well. And choose a partner who will understand your pain points and craft a solution that works for you.

Blog

8 Benefits of Virtual Medical Scribing

AI Medical Scribing Software: How DeliverHealth Stacks Up

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Medical Scribing: What’s the...

Denials Are Costing You Money Right Now. Here’s How to Ch...

5 Common Mid-Revenue Cycle Pains (& How to Solve Them)