In a busy ambulatory care practice, just a few minutes saved per patient on an everyday task like clinical documentation could be revolutionary for practice efficiency, profitability, and the care delivered. Read why it’s time to challenge the status quo of documentation processes, and how speech recognition can help clinicians do just that.
When you stop and consider the work processes you follow every day at your practice—the tools you use, the tasks you do, and the way you do them—do you notice areas where they could be improved? There are always opportunities to optimize a process, whether through something major like switching to new software, or something as minor as swapping the order of a few tasks.
But when a process works well enough to get you through your working day, targeting improvements can often end up at the bottom of the priority list. This is especially true in busy ambulatory care practices, where clinicians and practice managers are focused on balancing patient care with productivity, quality, costs, and other operational concerns.
Let’s take documentation as an example. Every clinician has their own established workflow for completing clinical documentation. Some type directly into an EHR during the encounter, while others hand write notes to type up between appointments. Those who prefer dictating might pass their recordings on to another team member to transcribe or outsource to a dedicated medical transcriptionist.
However you approach documentation, it forms a significant portion of the daily clinician workload. Ambulatory care clinicians we’ve interviewed report spending more than five hours a day documenting before, during, and after consultations. A study of over 155,000 US clinicians found that they spend more than 16 minutes per encounter, with a third of that time spent on chart review alone. With this burden directly contributing to rising burnout and limiting the time clinicians have for patients, we must rethink the status quo.
About Nuance® Dragon® Medical One
Dragon Medical One is a cloud based HITRUST certified speech recognition solution, integrated with MicroMD EMR, that provides a consistent and personalized clinical documentation experience across solutions, platforms, and devices regardless of physical location.
