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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Some healthcare provider organizations now employ medical scribes who follow physicians around and do all their EHR data entry. This is expensive, but can be cost effective because then the physicians have more time to perform billable procedures.

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The least capable doctor's time is worth $300/hr. The scribe is paid what, $25/hr?

This is so much like hearing of engineers that will not hire a $20/hr maid due to egalitarian reasons so they squat in filth or waste all their free hours cleaning, all while capable and willing cleaners starve. Insane.

Any competent engineer should at least have a maid, driver, nanny, servant, chef, gardener, pool cleaner, a mistress, dog walker and personal assistant /s

You are overestimating how much least capable doctor makes (more like 100-150k) and underestimating how much somebody who can type medical information makes (more like $30-$35).

Personal hours are not fungible. You can't replace a bit of cleaning time throughout the week with an additional $600.

Also there are plenty of costs to employing others besides the hourly cost. Large organizations have huge fixed costs to cover them. Consider:

- liability

- maintaining of knowledge and training to hire help

- skill to source and hire people

I live below the poverty level. I receive Section 8 funds for housing. The Section 8 inspections and quality standards are so important to me that I hire a cleaning service about 6 times a year to make sure everything in here is spotless, because I'm really not that psychologically or physically capable of cleaning everything, even if I had limitless free time to do it. The maids cost about $130 a visit and they're worth their weight in gold, just so I have peace of mind and a consistently clean place to live. The City thanks me for it, too.

Section 8 inspects your house to make sure you're cleaning your room? that seems... strange

If so, that's hilarious, because that's precisely one of the jobs all these expensive, painful-to-use computer systems were supposed to replace. You'd take a year or two course at junior college, to learn shorthand and drill some medical terminology so you'd be less likely to make a bunch of simple transcription mistakes, then go to work.

There's still a fairly large job market for medical transcriptionists, but that's a different job than being a medical scribe. Transcriptionists don't use shorthand any more, they mostly work from digital voice recordings. And they're typically not transcribing from scratch; now usually a voice recognition system does the first pass and then the human edits it to fix the ~2% errors. Transcriptionists don't usually work directly in EHRs, but their documents are fed into EHRs.

Microsoft recently bought Nuance for this very reason.

It's doubly hilarious when you realize it's the inverse of what the office productivity software did to everyone.

Remind me again why do I have to manage my own meetings and prepare so many powerpoints and fill in so many forms as a... well, my position doesn't matter, because everyone is doing the same, no matter their role?

Ah this is great to hear. I been thinking about this approach for a while. Great to hear it’s a Thing.

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