Doctors spend more than half of their time in administrative activities instead of caring patients. Among these, the compilation of electronic patient records is one of the most relevant. This is how this time can be reduced.
Austin Regional Medical Clinic, a multispecialty medical group serving central Texas with 25 health facilities in 10 cities, had been searching for a solution that could help reduce the clerical burden on physicians, introduce efficiencies into their interactions with the EHR, and allow them to focus more on patients.
Compiling the electronic medical record by typing information through a keyboard takes a long time and absorbs doctors’ attention to the detriment of patients.
Austin Regional turned to vendor Notable Health for the solution to its challenge. Notable Health’s technology leverages an Apple Watch to document physician-patient discussions and uses speech recognition, AI, machine learning and natural language processing to parse the conversation down to its relevant pieces and accurately record them directly into the patient’s electronic record.
The physician can simply dictate their findings into the Apple Watch before, during and after a visit. Simply by stating the section that is being dictated, such as ‘HPI’ or ‘physical exam,’ the technology places the text in the correct section of the note.
Notable Health system is able to incorporate certain types of templates for documentation for standardization and ease of use. At the moment there are 30 doctors using this technology, a number that is rapidly growing every week. Further, the technology is integrated with the group practice’s Epic EHR – used by Austin Regional – to reduce the manual work associated with order entry, service codes and routine visits.
The project went live in just two weeks. Six months after implementation, physicians have seen meaningful improvements in clinical workflows and patient engagement. Physicians save critical documentation time (1-2 hours per day) enabling enhanced patient care and reducing the documentation burden that often leads to burnout.
In addition to Notable Health, there are many speech recognition technologies for physician dictation on the market, from vendors including Nuance Dragon Medical One, Fusion SpeechEMR, M*Modal, NuScribe, Radekal, VoiceboxMD and ZyDoc.
Digital-health 