Pros
Great way to familiarize yourself with the various EMR platforms hospitals use for patient care. The ability to WFH offers nice schedule flexibility, though at times, will result in your seemingly getting less hours. Also, serves as a decent stepping stone to garner clinical experience to be utilized for furthering an individual's academics through graduate or doctoral programs in healthcare, or to gain healthcare experience before progressing on to a more lucrative role within another company elsewhere in medicine.
Cons
Schedule is dependent upon physician schedule... i.e., if you primarily work with a single doctor's office and they take a week's vacation, then the scribe will not get any shifts for the week (or pay) until the doctor returns to the office. Scheduled shifts are sometimes deleted at the last minute. Poor management at multiple levels with frequent employee turnover with multiple employees having quit without notice within my couple years of experience with the company..largely due to treatment by the higher ups and not providing us with a livable wage (or any bonuses or salary increases). No recognition of good work, yet suprisingly high expectations, especially when taking into consideration the reimbursement rate. Employees are frequently subjected to punitive disciplinary measures. Also, sites get to dictate their productivity expectations of the scribes working with their clinic, despite an increased note productivity pace not coming with any incentive to meet their demands such as bump in their hourly wage. This, (in addition to the internal employee performance tracking being poorly executed in general), has led to punitive diciplinary write ups for failing to deliver on the greater expectations. For example, the primary site I work with has an expectation that scribes deliver 30% faster delivery of notes compared to the overall policy of Scribe America (SA expects at least 2 notes/hour, while this site expects 3). Failure to satisfy these greater demands has led to two colleagues quitting without notice and multiple instances of my getting written up for unsatisfactory productivity.
