by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | April 27, 2015
From the April 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“For medical practices, just having an EMR is not enough,” Joseph says. “There are easily 20 applications running besides the EMR. Our physicians are not going through those systems…From a physician’s standpoint, when they see a patient, they want all the information presented to them in the right format. The Interface Engine is bringing everything together into the EMR and the patient record.”
Speaking their language
Another way physicians are mitigating some of the productivity losses is through the use of clinical speech recognition software from companies such as Nuance. More than 500,000 clinicians and 10,000 health care organizations use Nuance solutions, like Dragon Medical, to support and expedite clinical workflows, says Jonathon Dreyer, Nuance’s director of cloud and mobile solutions. The software allows doctors to dictate patient notes into the system, while they’re with a patient or after they have seen them.
“As we’re looking at the general trends within practices and hospitals, we’re seeing a greater appetite for mobility,” Dreyer says. “Physicians want to be able to have instant and secure access, whether it’s on their smartphones or tablets, or at their office or workstations. This shift to a more virtualized environment opens up a lot of opportunities for new workflow configurations that can be tailored to meet the physicians’ specific needs.”
Nuance has partnered with EMR vendors, such as Cerner, Epic and eClinicalWorks, on dictation applications for iOS and Android platforms, and has also moved to further boost productivity with clinical language understanding, which parses the clinical documentation, whether it was dictated with speech recognition or taken via transcription, extracts the relevant information needed to meet Meaningful Use criteria, and populates it accordingly within the EHR.
“It takes a lot of the administrative burden off of physicians by allowing them to document their patient notes in free-form narrative, a format to which they are already accustomed, and lets them focus on their patients.” Dreyer says.
M*Modal provides similar speech recognition and transcription services, such as Fluency Direct, which integrates with the EHR. Dr. Juergen Fritsch, M*Modal’s chief scientist, says the company differs from Nuance in that it works within health care exclusively.
In the fourth quarter of last year, M*Modal released Fluency Direct with computer-assisted physician documentation. The service provides clinically-driven feedback to help with providing more detail that physicians can use for diagnoses and for reimbursement. Fritsch says the company is still fine-tuning it. “More and more health care providers and physicians benefit from this kind of feedback,” Fritsch says. “They have a strong incentive not just to be efficient, but also to create higher quality documentation.”
