The employment of medical scribes to document in the electronic health record (EHR) on behalf of providers has become commonplace, but it could pose patient safety risks because scribes most often have no clinical training. This presentation will be based on a pre-COVID study published in JAMIA that investigated the work of scribes and identified best practices to assure that scribe use of the EHR is not a patient safety risk. It will be enhanced with a discussion of the impact of the pandemic on the safe use of scribes.
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Presenter
Joan S. Ash, PhD, MLS, MS, MBA
Joan S. Ash, PhD, MLS, MS, MBA is Professor, Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), Portland, OR. She has served on the Boards of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association, the Medical Library Association, on the National Library of Medicine's Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee, as chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications of NLM, and on several ONC work groups. Dr. Ash is an elected fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. In 2021, she was inducted as one of ten Distinguished Fellows of the American College of Medical Informatics.
Her research has as its focus behavioral and social issues related to implementing clinical information systems, specifically the unintended consequences of computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and clinical decision support (CDS), and the use of qualitative methods for conducting such studies. These methods have also been used to study safe use of the EHR: with Drs. Dean Sittig and Hardeep Singh, she developed, for the ONC, the Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Safety (SAFER) Guides, a suite of nine guides for organizations assessing the safety of their HIT. In 2021, their use became mandated by CMS. Most recently, her work has focused on EHR safety and scribes. She is proud to announce the forthcoming publication by Springer of the third edition of Evaluation Methods in Health and Biomedical Informatics by Friedman, Wyatt, and Ash on February 17, 2022, for which she wrote the qualitative and mixed methods chapters."