Cloud-based Dragon Medical One speech recognition empowers clinicians to improve productivity, efficiency, and quality of patient care.
Challenge
- Clinicians spending too much time and effort to complete patient notes
- Delay in population of patient data in EHR makes care coordination difficult and slows billing
- High transcription costs
Solution
- Dragon Medical One
Results
- Reduced transcription costs by $1.5 million
- 98% of total documentation now created using Dragon Medical One
- Real-time access accelerates documentation, speeds billing and enables faster decision-making
Hattiesburg Clinic, along with its 60 satellite locations, is the largest physician-owned multi-specialty practice in Southern Mississippi. The organization is staffed by more than 2,000 employees, and 400 providers representing 50 medical specialties—all dedicated to delivering quality care to over 3,000 patients daily.
Seeking a more efficient approach
Hattiesburg had embraced speech recognition technology in an effort to reduce its reliance on human transcription, but their on-premise approach was causing some frustration among staff members.
“ Our job is to provide dependable tools so clinicians can work more effectively and efficiently, focusing less on the computer and more on patients. We are pleased to report that the switch to Dragon Medical One was a success—it’s a change that’s making a huge difference.”
Constance Cain
Clinical Analyst, Hattiesburg Clinic
Workstations capable of running the software were hard to find, and even when one was available, clinicians often had issues accessing their personal voice profiles.
The team needed a faster, more cost-effective option with greater flexibility. The organization turned to cloud-based Dragon Medical One to reduce documentation turnaround while providing a secure, convenient, and personalized user experience.
A seamless transition
Nuance provided on-site support to help the clinic’s IT team promote a smooth transition by building out the new network, migrating user profiles to the cloud, and ensuring everything worked properly with the organization’s Epic EHR.
The team worked carefully to phase the roll out by first testing implementation with a beta group. Once initial tests were complete, the providers “were very excited,” said Jeff Williams, MD, Assistant Medical Informatics Officer and practicing pediatrician. “They thought it was surreal how much better the solution performed.”
Empowering teams to drive quality improvements
Dragon Medical One offers highly accurate speech recognition and in-workflow guidance to provide a more consistent experience. It allows clinicians to document more naturally across a wide range of devices and work securely—anywhere and anytime.
Documentation is not just a record of what happened, it is the foundation from which all care decisions are made and the basis for ensuring appropriate reimbursement, compliance, and quality. By documenting directly in the Epic EHR, Hattiesburg Clinic’s care teams and administrators could access patient notes immediately—improving patient safety, accelerating care, and enhancing operations.
“If a patient sees multiple providers over a series of days, it’s critical they share information properly. Not doing so can lead to unnecessary and costly interventions, which isn’t good for the organization or the patient,” explained Dr. Williams. “You don’t want to put people through duplicate studies or leave them vulnerable to prescription drug complications because the care team doesn’t have access to real-time information.”
Improving documentation and reducing turnaround time has allowed the team to bill for services faster and more efficiently, with less risk of delays or denials. This has helped speed revenue cycles, strengthen cash flow, and improve the organization’s overall financial performance.
Delivering results
Since implementing Dragon Medical One, clinicians at Hattiesburg are using the solution to create over 850,000 lines of documentation per month, or 92% of their total transcription efforts, which has yielded an impressive $1.5 million in savings.
Creating patient notes quickly and easily drives clinician satisfaction and affords them more time to dedicate to doing what they do best—caring for patients. “Our job is to provide dependable tools so clinicians can work more effectively and efficiently, focusing less on the computer and more on patients,” said Constance Cain, Clinical Analyst at Hattiesburg. “We are pleased to report that the switch to Dragon Medical One was a success—it’s a change that’s making a huge difference.”
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