VA pushing for scribes

I read today that the VA healthcare system is actually pushing for a bill to introduce and oversee scribes (see link). The first red flag is that anything the VA does is automatically suspect in terms of cost or any other efficiency (I've transcribed for them). But I'm suddently wondering, even if you pay your scribes only $9 or $10 an hour, how is that cost efficient vs. transcription? How many patient contacts can they actually handle in a day? A decent MT can process 40 or more reports. If a scribe documented 4 visits an hour for 8 hours (and what a pace that would be), that is 32, and I can hardly imagine that happening. What about downtime between visits, making patients wait until both the scribe and doc are free at the same time (if the scribe works for multiple providers, and if not, that much more downtime)? Rest and meal breaks? Scribes document in real time, at the pace of the visit; we get a summary of the pertinent information and can increase playback up to 200-300%. I plan to do some research on this out of curiosity, but before I do, does this strike anyone else as kind of ridiculous?

Maybe one benefit would be helping produce healthcare providers (since we're told med, nursing etc. students are a match for this job) who actually understand the process and importance of documentation, speaking clearly, etc. On the other hand, knowing the typical provider's abilities in communication, grammar, spelling, proofing, attention to detail, etc., is it really a good idea to have them doing documentation? Versus MTs whose whole lives are exactly those skills? Not to mention how grossly overworked healthcare students are already...do we want students already fallling down from exhaustion and overwork documenting healthcare visits?

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VA pushing for scribes - How is that cost efficient?

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