Continued progress in reinventing the relationship between people and technology.
DynamicHealth, provided by Cambridgeshire Community Services NHS Trust, is actively involved in an initiative called fitforthefuture.org. This is a sustainability and transformation programme covering hospital services, community healthcare, mental health, social care and GP services (primary care). The aim is to work together and take joint responsibility for improving the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough population’s health and wellbeing, outcomes and experiences of care.
To accommodate the growth in demand for services, and reduce the dependence upon back-office support, Sarah Saul, Service Manager, DynamicHealth chose investments in technology and partnerships with technology providers that would maximise front-line services and reduce/release administration backlogs and workload.
“Physiotherapy and other Allied Health Professional services are undergoing exciting changes leading to whole system improvements in the NHS. Dragon Medical integrated into our clinical documentation delivers efficiencies that support that change and our growth”, confirms Sarah Saul, Service Manager, DynamicHealth.
Sarah chose Nuance Dragon Medical Practice Edition front-end speech recognition integrated into the clinical documentation workflow. During or between patient appointments the Therapists use Dragon Medical Practice Edition to directly update the EPR using voice macros to speed navigation between fields and populate regularly used blocks of standard text. For clinic letters, a voice command is used to call up the template for the clinic letter with pre-created ‘Clinical Impression’ and ‘Management Plan’ fields followed by an area for free text. Using Dragon Medical Practice Edition, letter creation, proof reading and finalising takes five to ten minutes for a new patient and less time for a follow up appointment. Swiftly, following the clinic, letter processing is then completed by the administrator and sent out to the GP and patient.
The goal for the length of time on the MSK pathway is eighteen weeks and the whole team has experienced improvements to this timescale as a result of reduced report and letter backlogs, faster referrals to secondary care and time freed up to chase diagnostic reports and patient and other patient facing activities. Dragon Medical has improved the quality of notes within the team easily dealing with accents and mumbling. Accurate spelling, fewer abbreviations and more complete notes have improved communication with patients, within the team and with other specialties. Letter turnaround has been reduced from weeks to days.
Sources:
But where to start? Read how our customers used speech recognition to make a change and contact us to speak to an expert!
Learn more
What we learnt at HIC2019 from digital healthcare’s forward thinkers
With secure, cloud-based clinical speech recognition available to all their clinicians
Closing the gap between clinician and patient in documenting the patient encounter