Our Program
The OHSU Scribe Program began in 2011 in the Center for Women’s Health, initially piloted as a “home-grown” effort. The results at the time showed that providers using scribes closed their clinical encounters faster, completed other clinical tasks faster, and demonstrated higher productivity. The initial study was published and paved the way for a university-wide scribe program, which began in 2015 across OHSU clinics in Portland, Oregon.
Purpose
The OHSU Scribe Program has focused on using highly motivated health-degree focused individuals to help promote provider wellness, clinical efficiency, and productivity, all while preparing the future generation of healthcare providers.
Demographics
OHSU subscribes heavily in a student model when employing medical scribes. They are generally pre-health professionals who wish to enrich their studies or professional repertoire with clinical experience as a medical scribe. While scribes provide a valuable service for OHSU providers with their assistance in clinical documentation, the scribe also cultivates indispensable experience, knowledge, and skills that are directly applicable in future careers.
Benefits
"A career at OHSU elevates you: it raises your power personally, while making you exponentially better as a professional."
The OHSU Scribe Program is an internal (OHSU does not contract scribe services from external scribe vendors), student-focused model at an academic medical center, which allows several benefits.
OHSU is a nationally prominent research university and Oregon's only public academic health center. U.S. News and World Report has named OHSU Hospital the No.1 Hospital in Oregon. We educate health professionals and scientists and provide leading-edge patient care, community service and biomedical research. Our medical scribes become essential members of the healthcare team and work among our outstanding staff, students, and highly specialized faculty, who provide invaluable learning, mentorship, and networking experiences. OHSU employees are Torchbearers. It’s not only a job, it's a calling.
Our medical scribes are recruited, trained, and managed internally, which facilitates improved:
- Control over the direction of the program
- Oversight over employees to ensure sustained quality and compliance
- Utilization of shared OHSU resources
- Ability to freely scale according to demand across departments
- Accountability for program results
- Assimilation in the culture and mission of OHSU
Our medical scribes typically aspire to matriculate into graduate health degree programs (MD, DO, physician assistants, nursing, etc.) and are either nearing graduation or are within their “gap year(s)”. This has proved to be a talented demographic who already have a solid foundational skillset and a unique motivation to succeed, which are requisite for overcoming the learning curve and demanding workflow involved with becoming a medical scribe. Later on, many of the OHSU medical scribes leverage their experience and relationships to apply and achieve acceptance into graduate programs.
There is much activity across OHSU's mission areas of healing, teaching, discovery, and outreach. Therefore, many of our medical scribes are able to bolster their experience by participating in educational, research, and volunteering opportunities, in addition to their primary scribing assignments.