Featured Post

Speech recognition helps Fallon Clinic realize transcription savings f

Fallon Clinic in Worcester, Mass., has had EMRs in one form or another since 1992. Most recently, the multispecialty group practice replaced its home-grown system with an Epic Systems EMR, a project completed in late 2007. Throughout the five-year Epic implementation, clinic leadership wondered how the EMR would produce a return on investment. “Most of the savings were coming from two places,” Medical Director for Informatics Dr. Larry Garber explains in a podcast with the Health Business Blog. “One is the reduction of medical records staff, since we wouldn’t have to be shuffling paper throughout Central Massachusetts anymore. The other savings that we were looking for was a reduction in the transcription cost. We were spending several million dollars a year with doctors dictating into recorders and having those sent overseas electronically to be typed at 10 cents a line, so we budgeted a certain amount of savings,” Garber says. Fallon was hoping to cut the number of transcribed lines by 75 percent when the Epic implementation began in 2003. By 2008, transcription was down just 35 percent. For years, Fallon had been interested in speech-recognition technology to aid in physician documentation, but the quality of Dragon Naturally Speaking wasn’t quite up to the clinic’s standards in 2005. A newer version was, however, and Fallon installed the software in 2008 for a trial run among nine physicians and one PA. “What we found, which I guess was a little surprise, was that the time it took for the notes to be finalized in our electronic health record dropped from an average of almost four days prior to Dragon down to 46 minutes after using Dragon,” Garber says. To learn more: - read this transcript of the interview on the Health Business Blog

Read More

Rush to meet e-health deadlines could yield chaos

Posted by admin | Posted in Healthcare EMR, Uncategorized | Posted on 04-03-2010

Tags: , , ,

0

The rush to deploy comprehensive EHR systems to meet federal deadlines could create a “perfect storm” for healthcare IT: security gaps, system integration troubles, certification issues and clinician education issues, according to a two-part Computerworld report. To get it right, hospital IT pros first have to understand the technology they already have.

Erica Drazen, a managing partner in Computer Sciences Corp.’s healthcare group, told Computerworld that her company routinely asks prospective clients if they know where they are in EHR rollouts. Most have no idea.

A CSC survey found hospitals are just halfway to meeting federal standards for EHR reimbursement. There’s both good news and bad in the CSC survey, Computerworld said. For example, about 70 percent of hospitals already can support CPOE, one of the most basic elements of an EHR, and might not need to buy new hardware or software to move ahead there. But just 8 percent have such systems throughout their facilities.

“The issue is the timelines,” Denver Health CIO Gregg Veltri said. ”I wonder if anybody understands the reality of IT systems and how complex they are, especially when they’re integrated together.”

For more:
- read part one and part two of the Computerworld report
- check out the CSC survey report

Comments are closed.