About
Who wrote this
A course about a job is only worth as much as the person who has done the job. This one was written by somebody who has.
Prince Raj, MHA
Prince has spent 20 years in medical scribing across more than 100 emergency departments in 20 states. He founded the Medical Scribe and Clinical Information Manager programs at Yale New Haven Health System and at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
He completed an Administrative Fellowship in Hospitals and Health Systems at Yale New Haven, and served as Director of Emergency Medicine Operational Improvement at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He has trained hundreds of people to do this job and built the documentation standards they work to.
Why that matters for this course
That background is the reason several of the course objectives can be stated at all. A course written from a textbook can teach what a chart contains. It takes somebody who has sat in the room to know the rest.
That lethargic gets misread as tired
It means a decreased level of consciousness. On a child's chart, that distinction is the most dangerous one in the course, and it is why 2 flashcards carry a caution triangle instead of a body-system badge.
That a beginner writes the patient's words as though the provider found them
It is the same error the ambient AI documentation tools make, which is why the skill still has to be taught to a person.
That the negatives a provider dictates are the part a beginner leaves out
A denied symptom is a finding, not an absence. Unit 8 exists because of that.
None of those are facts to be looked up. They are the mistakes people actually make, and they are what the course is built around.
20 years of instructional design
Founding the scribe programs at Yale New Haven and the Geffen School meant building the training, not just running it. Curriculum, competency standards, assessment, and the documentation standards the trainees would work to — written, taught, revised against what actually happened on shift, and revised again.
Hundreds of people went through those programs. That is 20 years of watching where learners get stuck, which is a different kind of knowledge from knowing the subject. Nobody guesses at what confuses a beginner after the fifteenth cohort. They have watched it happen and know exactly which sentence caused it.
Prince recently completed the Chief Operating Officer Program at MIT, with a focus on designing and building AI products and services. That is what took the instructional design work to the next level: everything learned in a classroom, rebuilt as a system that teaches without one.
What that changed about this course
The design decisions in Scribe Class are not stylistic. Each one comes from something that went wrong in a room.
Nothing is delivered and then quizzed
Presenting and testing are the same action. A student learns a section of the chart by placing lines into it, not by reading about it and answering questions afterwards. Every one of the 15 units requires the student to do something before it will move. There is no version of sitting through this.
Every objective is written so it can be observed
Most learning objectives cannot be checked — they say a student will understand or appreciate something, and nobody can tell from outside whether that happened. The 10 objectives here use verbs with a moment attached: name, distinguish, construct, decode, transcribe, place, produce, decide. Each is mapped to the unit that teaches it, the task that assesses it, and its level of cognitive demand. The alignment table is on the schools page.
The gain is measured, not the score
24 questions before Unit 1, the same 24 at the end, blueprinted across 7 of the objectives. What comes back is a breakdown of which objectives moved — not a grade. And a student is never shown their score on the way in, because a low number at the door is a reason to stop.
Mistakes become the next exercise
Every term a student misses feeds an activity that rebuilds itself from their own errors. No 2 students see the same set. It is differentiated instruction that needs nobody to set it up.
Most of it is acquired without studying
There is no vocabulary list to review and no exam. A student who plays Word Fall 3 times has done spaced retrieval practice 3 times, and would not describe it that way. That is the tenth objective, and it is measured by whether they come back to a game unprompted.
Who the course is for
14 to 18 year olds, and the adults deciding on their behalf. That age is chosen rather than convenient. It is the last point at which a person can change direction without cost. A 16-year-old who discovers they do not want this has lost 8 to 10 hours. A 24-year-old who discovers it in the third year of medical school has lost most of a decade and taken on debt that outlasts the decision.
The problem is not that students choose medicine badly. It is that nothing has shown them what they are actually choosing. A teenager deciding to become a doctor has usually never seen a clinical note, never watched a provider reason through a differential, and cannot name a third profession in the building. The evidence available to them is a television drama, a relative's job title, and a general sense that the money is good.
The course assumes no science background, no family in medicine and no particular advantage. It assumes a keyboard, an hour at a time rather than an afternoon, and a reader who will close the tab the moment it becomes a lecture.
It also reaches people already working. A medical assistant, an EMT or a front-desk registrar can take the same 8 to 10 hours and come out able to read a chart critically, which is worth something in the role they already hold.
See the course
Free during the pilot cohort. The application is filled in by a parent, guardian, co-op leader or teacher.
Apply for the pilot Course objectives and alignmentProfessional training continues at Scribe Academy, and can be started from 16.
Issued by the Institute for Clinical Documentation Excellence.
All patients, encounters and records in this course are fictional.
Completion is not a professional credential, a license, or a qualification to practice.
Academic credit is awarded by the issuing school or parent, not by this course.
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