Medical students Angela Johnson and Juan D. Montoya, center, posed for a photo with Dr. Jeffrey Gold and Dr. Donna Woodson at the American Medical Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans. The students presented a poster about UT’s Medical Student Scribe Program and received two awards for their research.
The poster presentation titled “A Scribe Program’s Influence on Pre-Clinical Education and Improvements in Emergency Department Physician Efficiency” received first place in the clinical/epidemiology/health-care category and first place overall for poster presentations at the November meeting.
Angela Johnson and Juan D. Montoya, third-year medical students at The University of Toledo who have been involved with the scribe program since it began in 2009, presented the poster during the AMA conference in New Orleans. Second-year medical students Kavit Shah and Kirsten Schroeder also contributed to the poster.
Since the program’s inception three years ago, medical students have been volunteering as scribes in the Emergency Department at UT Medical Center, where they assist physicians by transcribing patient information for their records. The service has since expanded to other clinics and familiarizes the scribes with the electronic medical record systems used by physicians, in addition to providing the doctors with a useful service, which Johnson described as “a bonus for everyone.”
The program has grown to include more than 75 medical student scribes, with additional requests for scribes from other departments at UTMC.
Johnson said the opportunity to present the scribe program at the AMA symposium allowed the students to network with peers from other medical schools, and she hopes more students and physicians will have the opportunity to benefit from the program.
“We were humbled by the win. There were many outstanding presentations from schools across the country, and we feel honored to have been chosen,” Johnson said.
“There were 180 presentations in a wide variety of specialties from students and residents,” Montoya said. “It was rewarding to be selected as winners because this shows us that the program has the capacity to grow and expand with time and publicity, ideally to academic hospitals across the country.
“It was a great learning experience,” he said. “We couldn’t have done this without support from Dr. Jeffrey Gold, dean of the College of Medicine and Life Sciences, and Dr. Donna Woodson and Dr. Kris Brickman, faculty mentors who have allowed for the continued success of program.”
Click here for more information about the Medical Student Scribe Program.
