Three times faster: Time to rethink clinical documentation

“I feel my quality of documentation has improved markedly”

It is a challenging time to be a New Zealand physician with workforce shortages and burnout numbers higher than they have ever been. Practices are struggling to find and retain staff, while existing doctors are working overtime to meet the surging demand.

In this environment, it is crucial to explore effective strategies for clinicians to manage their workloads and mitigate the risk of burnout, ensuring the well-being of both healthcare providers and their patients. As clinicians spend a significant amount of their time on patient documentation, many practices are now investigating ways to streamline their documentation process.

Nuance Dragon Medical One (DMO) is a high-calibre conversational speech recognition software and medical documentation solution. It empowers doctors to create comprehensive clinical documentation more efficiently using just their voice, achieving around 130 words/min vs.40 words/min typing.

Speech recognition is a very efficient way to capture content directly into clinical systems, but additional features like predefined text, automatic formatting and intuitive voice commands help save even more time. Voice-based entry of patient records, notes, and prescriptions with Dragon Medical One has proven to be three times faster than typing and helps free up time for more important tasks.

DMO lets clinicians dictate directly into their application of choice and is compatible with all major EMRs, including MEDTECH, Incisive and My Practice.
It comes with a dedicated medical dictionary which is customised to the clinician’s subspecialty. Each user has their own personal profile and can train it further via corrections and by adding their own words and phrases to the custom vocabulary.

Thanks to its automatic accent detection and AI-powered speech recognition, Dragon delivers unparalleled accuracy, offering an optimal user experience right from the start.

Nuance Dragon speech recognition has been around since 1992, but reached new heights after its acquisition by Microsoft in 2022, now delivering even better compatibility, security and user experience.

After a very successful pilot program with Dragon Medical One at Mackay Hospital in Queensland in 2021, a number of Australian hospitals are now implementing Dragon Medical One speech recognition broadly across multiple departments.

“The pilot program showed results almost immediately.” Chief digital director for medical services at Mackay HHS Pieter Nel said. Participants dictated on average three times faster than their typing speed and released between one and 30 (!) extra hours of clinical care per week. Turnaround time for GP and specialist letters reduced from 30 days to 1 day.

Dr Nel said: "We calculated that over three months using DMO across the hospital, we had a saving of 140 hours of work. In dollars, conservative wages, we did save about $87,000 in that three months between the 25 licences.”

While Dragon Medical One has helped clinicians create documentation more efficiently, Emergency Medicine specialist Dr. Andrew Brier explains that it has also enabled him to enhance the quality of his documentation.

“What’s really hard to capture as a metric is quality, and I feel my quality of documentation has improved markedly,” he said. “Particularly for circumstances where you want more than just dot points on a page and you want to be more descriptive, like referral letters, complex end-of-life discussions, child safety issues, and domestic violence issues. Getting all that down in a time-efficient manner, with improved quality, is where this really comes into its own.”

By doing documentation in real time, clinicians remember the finer detail better and in a structured way. The improvement in quality of notes also then improves the coding system.

The next phase involves rolling Dragon Medical One out to the rest of the hospital, with the state health department coming up with some money to fund 400 licences across the service, including rural facilities, as part of a patient flow initiative.

Dragon Medical One has become widely adopted across hospitals in New Zealand. Now more and more specialists and general practices are implementing Dragon speech recognition to help ease the documentation burden for clinicians.

Dragon Medical One is approved by Te Whatu Ora and its hosting infrastructure is compliant with the NZ Privacy Act and the Health Information Privacy Code. Dragon is hosted on Microsoft Azure data centres in Australia and does not store any audio or text to eliminate the potential of leaked personal healthcare information.

The affordable subscription price makes Dragon Medical One viable for practices of all sizes. And with doctors saving two or more hours per day, most users reach the return-on-investment mark on their first day of usage each month.

Is your clinical team ready to leverage a innovative, proven and compliant tool to provide clinicians with the necessary resources to effectively manage their workloads?

Contact us at Sound Business Systems for a free demo and a free trial of Dragon Medical One to see how it will streamline your medical practice!