Why A Human Scribe Is Still Better Than AI Medical Scribing

Healthcare organizations can improve their efficiency levels and patient experience by using medical scribes to complete administrative tasks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) providers offer support through an AI scribe. This ambient clinical intelligence can be helpful. But as doctors need to dictate the necessary information, it’s not necessarily the solution needed to reduce a physician’s workflow.

Human scribes have the advantage over an AI medical scribe as they can support doctors by decreasing their documentation burden as they work in real time during the patient’s visit.

This means an increase in productivity and more time to concentrate on patients.

Risks Of Relying On AI For Medical Documentation

There are big temptations for medical clinics to accept AI as the solution to freeing up work hours for doctors after their patient encounters. However, companies actively promoting AI scribing often fail to highlight some significant shortfalls.

Inaccurate Notes

AI companies claim that their natural language processing technology is advanced enough to pick up what the essential parts of a conversation are.

Consultations often involve a bit of small talk at the beginning of a patient consultation about the weather or what they had for breakfast that morning.

Human medical scribes understand these are not suggested clinical notes but conversations.

However, some patients might have weather and temperature-related joint pain, while others might carefully track their food intake after surgery. In those cases, conversations about the weather and breakfast are meaningful.

Unfortunately, AI is not consistently able to distinguish between small talk and medically necessary information.

Inconsistent Time Savings

Time-saving is the main attraction for doctors with all types of technology. Voice dictation, human medical scribes, and AI medical scribes promise to relieve at least some of the burden doctors have to deal with for patient notes.

The problem with inaccurate and inconsistent AI technology is that doctors must allocate more time than expected. Even if some of the notes are accurate, it’s difficult to trust the system, and as a result, doctors still spend a lot of time proofreading medical records.

This type of inconsistency can add frustration and many hours of unnecessary overhead that distracts from being able to pay more attention to patients.

Outdated Medical Terminology

AI and natural language processing is based on large databases of information. Those databases require maintenance, and it’s not as simple as clicking a refresh button. That means it’s already outdated as soon as a new AI system is released.

The problem this limitation poses is that the medical field evolves rapidly, with new treatments, tests, medications, and terminology emerging on almost a daily basis.

With a medical documentation specialist who undergoes regular training in new terminology, that issue is vastly limited. When a human scribe does encounter a new and unknown language, it’s easy to flag and research it before the notes are finalized.

Delayed Billing

Inaccurate and incomplete medical notes can also result in significant delays in billing and payments issued by insurance companies. Even the smallest missing piece of information can mean that a billing department has to follow up with a doctor before submitting billing to the insurance company.

And if the information provided to insurance companies is inaccurate, there can be further delays in receiving payments.

These issues are less likely when there are human interactions and processing steps in recording medical data, resulting in fewer administrative distractions for doctors.

Prior Authorization Issues

The final issue that is highly relevant to all medical clinics is that there are strict requirements for processing prior authorization with insurance providers. This process is already fraught with administrative overhead to ensure every last piece of information is available to avoid delays.
Suppose medical records supporting treatments and medication are inaccurate or incomplete. In that case, it can lead to a bad patient experience when medical staff have to spend days following up on the relevant information.

Unfortunately, this is a common issue with AI medical scribes.

Advantages Of A Human Touch To Electronic Health Record Scribing

Healthcare providers can increase the time spent to improve patient care by taking advantage of medical scribes and EHR documentation to relieve them of administrative tasks. Here are six benefits your practice can expect from a human recorder.

Human Interaction With An Electronic Medical Records System

While physicians still rely on standard SOAP note-taking for patient interactions, most doctors go a lot further regarding all patient notes and documenting them in an electronic medical records system.

The other important factor is that every patient has a unique set of medical circumstances; putting those into context is the only way to fully record the patient’s diagnosis and treatment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a helpful tool for many types of note-taking. Still, the highly individual nature of doctor-patient interactions is too complex to sum up into an algorithm.

Whether a patient offers new information during a consultation or symptoms change enough to change the diagnosis, these conversations can become complex and impossible for an AI system to dissect.

Doctors draw on training and years of experience to treat the same symptoms and conditions in different and highly individualized ways, meaning that AI technology can’t adequately provide the context of those interactions.
With a trained human scribe, doctors can document their patient interactions. The scribe will enter all the relevant details from a consultation and enter the EHR documentation in a way that makes it easier for humans to review.

Personalized Assessment Details

Physicians who document their patient notes in an AI-electronic medical records system could face a problem as an AI-powered medical scribe cannot confirm the core findings of patient interactions in the system. As each consultation records the story of the patient’s specific visit, it’s essential to verify the information in context.

Patient assessment details and plans must be personalized as they are crucial to the patient’s experience. When patients offer new information during the visit, or their symptoms change, an AI scribe can’t dissect the conversations to enter the correct information. So, the physician still needs to write out the details personally.

Hiring DataMatrix human scribes is the best solution, as physicians can continue to talk to the patient so the scribe can enter the relevant information into the medical documentation system.

Additionally, the scribe can help by creating notes and entering orders instructed by the physician. This will save physicians time on administration tasks and provide more valuable time to direct patient care.

Realtime Scribing with Flexible Schedules

One advantage of hiring DataMatrix medical scribes to keep EHR documentation up-to-date is that they work in real time. They assist the physician in all administration tasks, including analyzing real-time conversations and running the practice smoothly. Doctors will also benefit from being provided with 100% scribe backup while AI takes no sick days. We have documented the other reasons why this is not the right approach.

But the most critical factor is that they are entirely flexible and can cover doctors’ schedules whether they have full-time or part-time needs. The scribes work with the doctor regardless of the time zone.

Human scribes share the burden, and physicians don’t need to spend time on documentation. Therefore, their workflow is reduced.

No Dictation Required

Working with an AI-powered scribe involves the doctor dictating patient notes for the documentation to be transcribed into the EHR system. This is time-consuming and must be done during the consultation or immediately after. So, this takes away from time spent giving patients their total concentration.

This can be avoided when you hire a DataMatrix medical scribe. They are fully trained to scribe notes from a conversation so they can input the medical information, leaving the physician to concentrate on patient care. Hiring medical scribes means there’ll be no disruption in the office’s workflow as the scribe can adapt to the physician’s needs and schedule.

The main advantage of human scribes is that they can scribe clinical notes directly from the doctor-patient conversation without doctors dictating the relevant information.

The doctor is guaranteed structured data to review at the next appointment.

Patient Privacy And HIPAA Compliance

Many physicians are concerned about patient privacy. That is why AI-powered medical scribes essentially document the patient’s medical history rather than a human over the phone.

The disadvantage of this natural language processing technology is that it’s a limited tool. It will only transcribe the given data. It’s not able to identify and sense doctor-patient interactions.

On the other hand, a human scribe can support physicians by scribing patient notes with relevant information while the physician focuses on the patient experience. As virtual scribes are not present at the consultation, they only have access to the audio portion of the encounter.

In compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations, doctors must inform patients of the presence of the virtual medical scribes before the appointment.

This informs the patient that there will be a scribe for documentation purposes, and information will be fully protected, just like all the other patient data.

Consistent Supply Of Trained Scribes

Artificial intelligence can solve the problem of employees leaving due to administrative burnout. Training new scribes is time-consuming and costly and can cause significant administrative overhead.

AI intelligence can also be the solution when patients are uncomfortable having a human present to complete the patient notes. However, working with an AI-powered medical scribe is less efficient with EHR documentation. A human touch in transcribing the notes is critical.

DataMatrix virtual scribing solutions take advantage of a medical scribe to ensure the accuracy of patient notes. It offers a 100% backup with a team of experienced scribes focused on the most accurate documentation of patient encounters.

The advantage is that instead of dealing with an individual, you’ll partner with a company that will eliminate the supervision overhead of managing more admin staff in your practice.

Find Out More About Medical Scribing Services At DataMatrix

Here at DataMatrix, we have a professional team of highly-trained medical scribes. Our scribes assist healthcare organizations in ensuring efficient medical documentation in their practice.

DataMatrix is not an AI system. We offer a superior virtual service that will help physicians reduce the time spent on administration tasks, allowing more time to spend with patients.

You can be confident that all relevant information will be correctly entered into your systems. We handled it with full HIPAA compliance.

Our service for virtual medical scribing will improve your medical practice management efficiency while making your practice more patient-friendly.

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