In case you missed Part 1 of this blog entry, you can find it here

If you currently have a transcription department that the physicians are happy with, there’s nothing wrong with continuing to have the physicians dictate all of the patient notes and letters. There are obvious advantages to having the physicians or caregivers enter their own notes such as having the data on the patients record immediately as well as reduced transcription costs but as we spoke about in Part 1, this is not always possible.

We’re going to look at two scenarios and how we’ve handled them in the past;

Scenario 1: The clinic had a transcription department but had no central dictation system and were using failing tape-based equipment

This is an extreme case however it is not uncommon. In this type of scenario, we would generally recommend a two step approach. For the physicians or care givers that are willing to enter their own data but aren’t thrilled about typing it in themselves, we would recommend Dragon Medical Practice Edition for Speech Recognition. This would allow them to enter their own notes and letters by dictating as they currently do.
For the physicians or caregivers who have no interest in entering their own data, we would recommend them continuing to dictate and for that, there would be two options. If the facilities short-term goal is to get everyone entering their own EMR data whether through Speech Recognition or manually, we would recommend using an ASP provider for dictation (such as our vScription SaaS offering) so no capital investment would be required or long-term commitment or if there were no plans to eliminate transcription, look at an on-premise digital dictation system. We currently sell and service a few different brands of digital dictation systems however in a clinic environment, we always recommend the Winscribe dictation system for it’s scalability, price point and ease of use.

Generally what we see is once we have a few Dragon Medical Practice Editions in a facility and the other physicians see how easy it can be to enter their own notes that they want to switch over.

Scenario 2: The clinic has a transcription department but they are looking at having the physicians enter their own EMR data

This one is really straightforward. Dragon Medical Practice Edition allows physicians and caregivers to enter all of their notes using text to speech. This can take a bit more training for the users who may not be as technically-savvy but we work with the office managers or IT staff to ensure they are familiar with the product and can train the doctors as required or we can provide the training ourselves either onsite or remotely.

We also work with the Office Manager or IT staff to configure the Dragon Medical Practice Edition to be able to provide at least some basic control over the EMR to reduce the amount of keystrokes required to navigate and use the EMR as well as create any macros or templates as required as well as tweaking the vocabulary within the Dragon application

If you currently have an EMR or are planning on switching and would like more information on how Dictation, Transcription and Speech Recognition can help your EMR adoption, please contact us and let us share our expertise with you.

Post By: +Ryan Gaudet