Dictaphone offers a comprehensive set of workflow alternatives to meet a variety of user needs and produce the greatest as well as the most rapid customer gain from Speech Recognition technology, including:

• Ability to integrate our Speech-Certified Transcription Network services seamlessly within your current HIM workflow—customers already using our dictation systems also have a "head start."
• Rapid and cost efficient deployment of Speech Recognition Editing using our Speech-Certified Transcription Network to edit speech-recognized text reports at considerable cost savings.
• Ability to move your organization to greater use of the Provider self-documentation tools offered as part of Dictaphone's Enterprise Workstation, thus reducing, the volume of reports requiring human transcription/editing on an on-going basis. Your outsourcing costs will continue to decline over time!

As part of our iChart service, Dictaphone can help you assess the "true" cost of your current transcription infrastructure. Nuance contracts with a third-party "transcription auditing" partner who will analyze your transcription company's billing practices and provide you with a complete unbiased assessment of past charges.

Past audits have revealed some of the following billing discrepancies:

• Inadequate Billing Detail.
• No true MT line counting standards for billing.
• Challenging Audit Trail and Process.
• "Special Characters" Can Inflate Line Counts By 15%.
• "Invisible Characters" Can Inflate Line Counts Up To 20-40%!
• Poorly Designed Templates can lead to Excessive Line Counts.
• Multi-page Reports can Drive Excessive Characters and/or hidden words.

The command center for iChart is Dictaphone's own Internet Data Center, which today is processing over 35 million lines of dictation per month. An IT staff, whose sole responsibility is iChart, supports the Center, which is directed by a senior Dictaphone executive accountable for the program.

Coverage is 24/7 to maintain uptime. iChart also has dedicated trainers and project management personnel, who make sure that your migration to iChart Managed Services is as smooth and expeditious as possible.

Hardware and network infrastructure are regularly upgraded to the latest technology to support your growing use of Speech Recognition. You are able to stay current with technology without the capital investments!

Security is an understandable concern for all healthcare providers. Dictaphone uses the highest level of available encryption software as well as VPN technology to insure security. Security and access policies and procedures are in place at the Internet Data Center in line with best practices.

While transcriptionist editing of speech recognized documents via iChart® Managed Services offers attractive ROI, more and more organizations are finding the best productivity gains can be achieved using Nuance's browser-based Enterprise Workstation™, which lets providers dictate, review, and sign reports from any Internet-connected PC.

Through iChart Managed Services you can reduce your reliance on transcription labor by having a portion of your providers use Enterprise Workstation. This alternative gives providers once-and-done control over the report creation process, while maximizing transcription cost savings and eliminating turn-around time.

Some organizations are attacking the rising time and costs of documentation through a more data-driven approach, favored by today’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. But for most providers, dictation is more comfortable, natural, and has proven to offer the speed of speaking.

EXSpeech® uses Speech Recognition technology to convert dictation to text documents. Then, we use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract key clinical data elements — problems, medication, allergies, procedures — from text documents to provide clinical information in a format that is easy for the provider to access, search, and organize. These clinical data elements can also be used to populate an EMR. Thus, clinical documentation — reports or notes — are transformed into clinical information.

By extracting and structuring valuable information trapped in paper reports, Natural Language Processing technology makes dictated data available electronically to the provider on an individual patient basis.

Data extracted from narrative reports is presented through an easy software lookup which makes patient information accessible at a glance. Providers can now easily "toggle" between summary patient data and the actual electronic text reports from where this data originated. When creating new reports, pulling in patient history and current lists of problems, medications, allergies, and procedures from previous documentation ensures that no critical information is left out. Healthcare organizations don’t need to make a massive investment and transformation to an EMR to get that access!