Over the past decade many hospitals have been doing their very best to integrate the newest intelligent devices into use, and with great success. The one area that has seen amazing progress is the management of electronic health records (EHR), which truly needed to be made more efficient. In the modern medical environment speech recognition technology has become essential to patient care and to increased productivity in relation to health record maintenance.

With a previous change in EHR practices, physicians were required to type in details to a patient’s records through a computer program. Many doctors were frustrated, complaining that it was time consuming and tedious work to fill out the forms, and in addition they lost valuable one-on-one time with their patients. In 2009, according to a survey by the AC Group (a health care technology advisory company) it was discovered that out of 2200 EHR users, 53% of the physicians had reverted back to handwritten notes and dictation, and up to 18% of the physicians had completely stopped using the EHR.

Now, in participating hospitals, physicians have been able to take advantage of the new speech recognition technology that has been paired with their current EHR system.
The integration of programs like Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) and Nuance’s Dictaphone EXSpeech has allowed doctors to record the patient information directly. The speech recognition programs can access computer programs and make transcriptions that can be sent directly to a medical transcriber.

Before the inception of DNS, doctors’ notes had to be typed out and sent for approval to the doctor who recorded them. This took time and effort to achieve a proper medical history report – time that was a precious commodity. The only real change, when it comes to using the new DNS and Dictaphone devices, is to the job of the Medical Transcription (MT) professionals responsible for transcription.

With the advent of the DNS-EHR merger, the MT’s received the medical notes already transcribed by the DNS technology. The MT’s are now responsible for proofreading and editing the documents for accuracy. The completed transcription, once doctor approved, could be uploaded directly to the hospital data system and be easily available for reference within 24 hours.

With these most recent improvements, which match the convenience of voice recordings with almost instant documentation, both the hospitals and physicians are very satisfied. For example, North Ohio Heart Center had been suffering under a huge backlog of over 12,000 medical transcriptions before getting on board with Dictaphone EXSpeech. Now they have reported that they have achieved a 40% cost savings on transcription and are able to have patients’ updated electronic records available in no time at all.

Their Chief Executive Officer, Gary Zrimec, had found that having only EHR did not solve the problems that North Ohio Heart Center and Medical Group were having. He reported that Dictaphone was the solution. The ease of use by the doctors and the speeding up of EHR processing eliminated substantial time and transcription costs.

In hospitals across the US, where the Dragon Naturally Speaking and Dictaphone EXSpeech are available, more than 200,000 doctors are using the speech recognition programs. The goal is to make DNS-EHR available in all hospitals and medical centers. Those hospitals with the DNS-EHR systems already in place are certainly enjoying the benefits: they are almost paperless, their employees are working much more efficiently, and the processing of electronic health records has become smooth sailing.