The Impact of Medical Scribes on Relative Value Units in a Pediatric Primary Care Practice

Abstract

Our study assessed the impact of adding medical scribes to an academic pediatric primary practice by measuring the relationship between work relative value units (wRVUs) and use of the medical scribe. This is a retrospective comparative study on the effect of medical scribes on average wRVUs per patient encounter. wRVUs were abstracted from procedure codes in the billing system. Six clinicians performed 2277 patient visits included in the study over 2 different time periods during 2017 and 2018. The first period was without the use of medical scribes and the second period included scribes. Average clinician wRVU production per visit increased by 7.68% (P < .001) with medical scribes over the previous period without them. This study shows that scribes contribute to improving the wRVU per visit in a primary pediatric practice. This finding is consistent with other research showing that scribes help increase volume and improve wRVUs for specialists who perform complex procedures.