When was the last time you felt like you could focus on what your patient was truly saying?
Many nurse practitioners do not realize they can utilize virtual scribes to improve focus and provide better care for patients. NPs want to provide excellent patient-centered care and realize that actively listening helps to provide that care. When a patient truly feels heard, it improves a patient-provider relationship.
But instead, most nurse practitioners struggle with focus because of stress, distractions, open charts, and a waiting room full of patients. When we walk into a patient room, our mind is already bombarded by the amount of information we intake from the patient, assess, and then decide our diagnosis and treatment plan. This decision fatigue cause can nurse practitioners to lose focus.
Plus, it can feel disruptive or rude when the nurse practitioner is charting in the patient room. When APRNs keep looking at the computer, it takes away from the patient-provider relationship. Nurse practitioners can easily be distracted within the electronic medical record and make it seem like nurse practitioners don’t care what the patient is saying.
Nurse practitioners can utilize virtual scribes to focus more on the patient and provide better care.
How nurse practitioners can utilize virtual scribes
A virtual scribe is a person highly trained in medical terms and documentation. The person is remote and connects via video and/or audio on a computer or tablet. The virtual scribe will listen to the entire clinical visit between the nurse practitioner and the patient.
A virtual scribe will abstract any important information and document into the electronic medical record. This allows the nurse practitioner to focus on the patient instead of charting or making notes of what the patient said.
When nurse practitioners utilize virtual scribes to document the patient visit, NPs have more time to actually care for patients! The nurse practitioner does not have to be consumed by putting in lab orders or sending prescriptions to the pharmacy.
Instead, the nurse practitioner’s full attention is on the patient. This can increase patient satisfaction because the patient knows this nurse practitioner is actually listening.
Not to mention, the scribe can have the note completed when the patient walks out of the clinic room!
This can be a tremendous benefit to the nurse practitioner. Think about it, staying on time during the workday and avoiding the mental fatigue. No more constantly running behind schedule with a large number of open charts and other tasks.
Think of the positive impact a virtual scribe will have on a nurse practitioner’s work-life balance! A virtual scribe eliminates hours of the nurse practitioner’s time charting, no more bringing charts home!
Solution to utilize virtual scribes
Virtual scribes offer so many benefits to nurse practitioners (learn about 10 benefits of virtual scribes). But with many virtual scribe companies out there, it is hard to know which one would be a good fit for you as a nurse practitioner.
That is why The Burned-out Nurse Practitioner has partnered with ScribeEMR to offer nurse practitioners a quality, customized service to help you overcome nurse practitioner burnout and get your life back! ScribeEMR virtual scribes are dedicated to providing real-time documentation and easing the workload for nurse practitioners.
If you have seen the value that ScribeEMR virtual scribes can offer to nurse practitioners and would like more information, please contact The Burned-out Nurse Practitioner. I would love to help facilitate ScribeEMR services to your current nurse practitioner practice!
For time management and charting tips, check out The Nurse Practitioner Charting School– The one stop for all documentation resources created specifically for nurse practitioners. Learn more at www.npchartingschool.com
**Full disclosure, this blog post may include affiliate links. I do receive a commission if any of the affiliate programs/services/supplies are purchased. This is at no extra cost to you but does allow me to continue to provide content as The Burned-out Nurse Practitioner! Thank you!
