Voice-enabled EHR makes it possible for physicians to speak their notes
RENTON, WA - Providence Health & Services, which employs more than 64,000 people in five states - Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon and Washington - will roll out speech recognition technology across the healthcare system to 8,000 clinicians in 27 hospitals and 250 clinics.
Providence Health tapped Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications for its Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition. The organization-wide deployment will support Providence's rollout of the Epic electronic health record system making it possible for clinical staff to document and navigate the EHR by speaking, officials said.
Over the next year, Dragon Medical will be integrated with Epic. Once fully deployed, clinicians will be able to interact with, document and navigate through the EHR simply by using their voice - a workflow that, according to Nuance executives, is proven to be more efficient and natural than typing alone, leading to faster EHR system adoption and improved physician satisfaction with EHR use.
"Dragon Medical builds upon our current Nuance-driven background speech workflow through eScription and will give physicians more documentation options," said Laureen O'Brien, CIO, Providence Health & Services. "We are very excited to make this tool available to all of our providers in order to enable them to be more efficient. Using Dragon Medical allows clinician findings to be immediately part of patients' medical records and available to all care providers, improving overall patient care and coordination, the provider's experience and making healthcare more affordable."
If the experience of Robert Frank, MD, a physician who practices family medicine at Aurora Advanced Healthcare in Milwaukee, is any indication, the physicians will appreciate the technology. Frank started using Dragon Medical in 2000. Today, Aurora Healthcare has chosen speech recognition "in a very big fashion," he says, rolling out to 1,200 of its employed physicians. They will use Dragon technology as a hybrid model with charting tools that are built into the Epic EHR.
Frank uses speech technology every day for all his medical documentation, he says, including chart notes, telephone messaging, staff messaging and order commenting. "We see a significant workflow efficiency advantage when a physician can document directly into our EpicCare EMR," he said.
Hal Baker, MD, CIO at WellSpan Health, an integrated delivery network in York, Pa. recalls the anxiety among physicians during WellSpan's EHR rollout - the "you can't make me do this" attitude among some doctors. They are afraid to look foolish, Baker said, and "one way of looking foolish is if you can't type." Speech recognition for doctors, who are used to dictating their notes, eases that level of anxiety, he says.
As part of the Dragon Medical deployment, Providence will provide its clinical staff with physician-led training and standard, voice-enabled documentation templates to enable faster adoption and assimilation with current established workflows. With a voice-enabled EHR, documentation can be done by speaking in free-form or to trigger various clinical templates and medical record review, and sign-off can occur in real-time - eliminating the time lag and costs associated with medical transcription.
"Deploying voice recognition, at this point, is a standard best practice for electronic physician documentation and EHR adoption," said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Healthcare.
Nuance has deployed more than 450,000 clinicians across 10,000 healthcare facilities, according to the company.
"Providence's commitment to ensuring its entire physician base successfully adopts and utilizes the EHR is commendable and will result in high-value captured data that ultimately can be leveraged for better care delivery," Dillione said.
Nuance executives say Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition is specifically designed for large-scale health systems to support advanced integration with leading EHR systems, within Citrix-based environments.
