{"doi":"10.1093/jamia/ocaa345","title":"An interview study with medical scribes on how their work may alleviate clinician burnout through delegated health IT tasks","abstract":"OBJECTIVES: To understand how medical scribes' work may contribute to alleviating clinician burnout attributable directly or indirectly to the use of health IT. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews with 32 participants who had scribing experience in a variety of clinical settings. RESULTS: We identified 7 categories of clinical tasks that clinicians commonly choose to offload to medical scribes, many of which involve delegated use of health IT. These range from notes-taking and computerized data entry to foraging, assembling, and tracking information scattered across multiple clinical information systems. Some common characteristics shared among these tasks include: (1) time-consuming to perform; (2) difficult to remember or keep track of; (3) disruptive to clinical workflow, clinicians' cognitive processes, or patient-provider interactions; (4) perceived to be low-skill \"clerical\" work; and (5) deemed as adding no value to direct patient care. DISCUSSION: The fact that clinicians opt to \"outsource\" certain clinical tasks to medical scribes is a strong indication that performing these tasks is not perceived to be the best use of their time. Given that a vast majority of healthcare practices in the US do not have the luxury of affording medical scribes, the burden would inevitably fall onto clinicians' shoulders, which could be a major source for clinician burnout. CONCLUSIONS: Medical scribes help to offload a substantial amount of burden from clinicians-particularly with tasks that involve onerous interactions with health IT. Developing a better understanding of medical scribes' work provides useful insights into the sources of clinician burnout and potential solutions to it.","journal":"Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association","year":2021,"id":197315,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":13,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9524,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":770717,"name":"Kathryn Rosenbaum","orcid":"0000-0002-5498-8814","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":274509,"name":"Kai Zheng","orcid":"0000-0003-4121-4948","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":397332,"name":"Brian D. Tran","orcid":"0000-0003-2342-700X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":60,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:50:19.568641Z","pmid":"33576391","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}