As more healthcare providers identify the need to standardize documentation and free up physicians’ time to focus on patient care, hospitals, clinics, and private medical practices nationwide are now building in-house teams of certified medical scribes. To help those organizations assess and recruit the best scribe candidates, the American Healthcare Documentation Professionals Group (AHDPG) has just launched the Online Medical Scribe Readiness Assessment—and it’s free to employers and candidates alike.
“A medical scribe is an unlicensed assistant to the physician who performs documentation in the EHR, gathers information for the patient’s visit, and partners with the physician to deliver the most efficient, highest-quality patient care,” said AHDPG President and CEO Peter Reilly. “The use of medical scribes is exploding with the implementation of electronic medical record systems, but identifying top candidates can be a challenge for employers who are just beginning to hire their own medical scribe teams.”
Here’s where AHDPG’s free Online Medical Scribe Readiness Assessment can help. Designed to help healthcare employers find their best-fit scribes, the assessment measures each candidate’s existing knowledge of medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, disease processes, labs, and HIPAA/HITECH.
The 60-minute timed assessment, which cannot be taken more than twice in a 30-day period, is available on the AHDPG website or can be linked directly from employers’ websites, allowing medical scribe candidates to complete it for free online.
Healthcare organizations can send just one candidate to the tool or refer multiple candidates to identify stand-out medical scribes. If an employer requires all candidates to enter the organization’s name and contact information, AHDPG will aggregate candidates and share the group’s results with the hiring manager.
For candidates, the assessment is a simple (but not necessarily easy) way to see whether they’re ready for the top jobs—from entry-level to upper-level—in the rapidly growing medical scribe field and identifies the next steps needed to become Apprentice Medical Scribe Professionals (AMSPs) or Certified Medical Scribe Professionals (CMSPs). For employers, the Assessment is a powerful screening tool in a profession that is not yet regulated.
Nearly 1,000 people have taken the AHDPG’s free Online Medical Scribe Readiness Assessment. As a result, each candidate found out how much more training he or she might need to become an AMSP or CMSP. Just as importantly, prospective healthcare employers discovered which of their scribe candidates were best suited for the job.
“The Online Medical Scribe Readiness Assessment is a highly specialized screening tool for employers and candidates,” Reilly explained. “We anticipate it will streamline the hiring process for healthcare organizations and private practices looking to leverage their medical assistants, medical transcriptionists and other allied health professionals as medical scribes while giving these candidates a roadmap to nationally recognized certification.”
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