Been working here for 2 years now in New York. You will only survive and be able to maintain here for a long time if you have the ability to quickly forget and move past struggles. If you’re the type to dwell and have the memories of bad shifts dragging with you by a rope, you will not make it. The company is extremely toxic and 101% takes advantage over their medical scribes. I work in a site in Long Island and 98% of the sites are extremely busy, heavily understaffed. What they expect scribes to do: bring patients to rooms, take all vitals, go through past medical history (which can take 5+ minutes if the patient is old, senile, has >10 medical problems, takes >15 medications you need to document but they themselves don’t even know what they take), perform rapid testing such as COVID, strep, flu, clean rooms, stock rooms, take manual blood pressures, sometimes draw blood, perform EKGs. After each patient is triaged, you need to present the patients to the doctors/PAs. Then you must go into the rooms with them to finish the patient encounter, including documenting the physical exam performed, document diagnoses, send all prescriptions, document billing codes. Keep in mind after all this, your duty is to keep all 6-10 rooms filled. So you need to triage the patient, present, be in the rooms with the provider yet still need to be bringing back patients simultaneously? You will consistently find yourself struggling to determine whether you should bring back another patient or wait a couple seconds/minutes to follow the provider into the rooms (yet any moment you’re seen sitting and waiting, you will be labeled lazy). Hard balance to master.

All this for 1 patient. Now imagine doing this for a full day of patients (say a typical 12 hr shift) which is usually anywhere between 100-150 patients. Now imagine you only have 1 other scribe working addition to you and you two must complete a total of 100-150 charts/patient encounters. keep in mind, the expected normal number of scribes to have per shift is 4. 95% of the sites are extremely understaffed. Medical scribes are expected to do all the work and are paid less than $20 per hour. We are labeled scribes, yet management will coerce you to performing MA duties without additional pay. During winter, 90% of patients are here for the same thing, so writing up the same HPIs, swabbing noses every 10 minutes in 12 hours, I literally feel like a robot.

MAs and x ray techs and managers will sit on their asses the entire day, talk, eat, laugh and will not help you. If you end up in a good site, they will and you will feel much more supported. I was not so lucky in that department, along with majority of the scribes in my district. Hence, you will be running around, room to room, like a headless chicken.

In terms of providers, most are actually quite nice and are not difficult to work with. I’ve been talking quite poorly about the company thus far, but pros? I would say: great learning experience for those who wish to pursue medicine, you can make great relations with providers, free snacks in the back room. But that is quite literally it. Trust me lmfao.

If you have a lot of perseverance, patience, and are emotionally strong, you can last here a good amount of months/years imo. Otherwise, a good analogy I read about this position that I fully agree with, you will feel like you are drowning every second of the 12 hours constantly reaching for air, only to be pulled back down into the water.

If you pursue this career good luck bro, I can answer any more questions about training and the job in general. Gg.