Medical Documentation—Costly and Growing
It is estimated that the annual cost of medical transcription is over $6 billion for labor alone. Even with this level of expenditure, more and more Health Information Management departments are hard pressed to keep up with the growth in the number of reports generated, fueled by regulatory requirements and increasing medical procedures.

Healthcare professionals are rapidly turning to speech recognition technology for help. By taking labor out of the human transcription process, Dictaphone speech recognition technology is delivering measurable and significant gains in productivity (50-75% transcriptionist productivity gains) and real-dollar savings (typical ROI under 12 months).

Dictation—The Preferred Documentation Method
Dictation offers exceptional ease-of-use and the ability to provide physicians with a proven and effective way to express nuance and detail when documenting patient information. Many healthcare providers have long preferred dictation as their chosen documentation method and often view it as critical to the patient care process.

Perhaps the biggest limitation of traditional dictation is that discrete data is not generated through the creation of the narrative report, and the process itself has become costly and time consuming if manual transcription labor is used to create written reports.

Physician Resistance and Lack of Use Minimizes EMR Use/Benefits
For all their promise, EMRs have achieved limited adoption, as providers are often extremely uncomfortable with user interface methods that can require substantial keyboarding and point-and-click data input. Physician resistance and lack of use minimizes benefits of the EMR, especially in a comprehensive database of patient information.

The alternative proposed by Dictaphone employs Natural Language Processing to achieve the completeness in a database that makes the EMR truly useful.

Analysts estimate that over half of a typical patient record is generated from dictation or handwriting. Relatively little in the record today enters as structured data, and very little comes about from direct data entry by physicians. Dictaphone technology offers a way out of this dilemma by converting the very large volume of clinical information currently “trapped” in narrative reports into valuable and usable structured clinical data.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Technology—A “Best-Of-Both Worlds” Alternative
Through the use of new Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, Dictaphone is creating a “best-of-both worlds” environment, offering the freedom of narrative dictation, the speed and cost savings of speech recognition, and now the structured data value and ease of information access of an EMR.

NLP locates in narrative medical reports four of the most highly sought after pieces of information on patients:

• Medications
• Allergies
• Diagnoses
• Procedures

These data elements form the core of the electronic patient record and are typically presented in the “top view” in EMR software.

Structured Data, Faster Documentation, Enhanced Physician Productivity
The combination of dictation, speech recognition, and NLP aims not only to streamline the documentation process as it exists today, but also to shorten the amount of time physicians spend dictating. With the ability to dictate notes, have them immediately recognized, and then signed electronically, there are no delays for hours or sometimes days between dictation, signature, and electronic report availability—“once-and-done”.

With voice-driven—not keyboard-driven-templates, form fill-ins, and normal text, a few words can trigger extensive text, eliminating the repetition and need to dictate material that has been dictated previously. NLP technology can be used to “jump start” reports. Combining the ability to pull in key patient-specific information, such as medications and allergies, from a database of extracted data into a new report, then combing this with normal text or information from previously dictated reports, the amount of information requiring new dictation is minimized—saving considerable time.

Introducing mdEssential™—The EMR Alternative Physicians Will Use
Solutions like the new Dictaphone mdEssential for clinic and physician groups allows providers to continue to document encounters using their preferred input method—dictation—while simultaneously speeding them up and improving the completeness and accuracy of their documentation. mdEssential achieves this while also producing structured patient data that is now readily available to the provider at the point of documentation, where it has the greatest value. Through this process, clinical documentation, reports, or notes are transformed into clinical information.

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