The Impact of Scribes on Advanced Practice Provider Burnout

Burnout is the highest among Emergency Department (ED) providers; Advanced Practice Providers (APPs) are leaving the specialty which reduces access to care. Medical scribes have been employed in healthcare settings to reduce the documentation burden on medical providers, allowing them to focus more on patient care. This paper aims to evaluate the impact of medical scribe use on emergency department advanced practice providers (APP) productivity, burnout, and job satisfaction. A systematic, comprehensive, and broad review of the literature was conducted to examine the advantages and disadvantages of employing medical scribes. Scholarly search engines (e.g., CINAHL, EBSCOhost, Cochrane Library, and PubMed) were utilized to search for peer-reviewed and credible articles. The results of the literature indicated organization wide benefits with scribes, however, cost may outweigh it. These concerns have led to initiation of an evidence-based project to break down the causes, concerns, and benefits of APPs with and without medical scribes within a busy southwestern emergency department in the United States. Scribes were implemented for 5 consecutive days with and 5 consecutive days without scribes. Results showed an overall decrease in burnout, increase in productivity, and decrease in after work hours documentation time, demonstrating that scribes provided significant benefits for APPs in the Emergency Department. Future research would dive into the financial implications of scribes for an organization and the use of artificial intelligent scribes.