Success story—Dragon Medical One improves outpatient CDI

Homerton University Hospital
re‑imagines clinical documentation in outpatient services

Dragon Medical One secure, cloud‑based speech recognition reduces transcription costs, speeding up clinical correspondence and freeing up time to care.

Transforming care through speech recognition

Homerton University Hospital set out to realise its mission of ‘Safe, compassionate, effective care provided to our communities with a transparent, open approach.’ Two transformation initiatives focused on how the Trust organises and delivers administrative support and outpatient services. They turned to Nuance Dragon Medical One speech recognition.

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Challenge

  • Redesign outpatient services to deliver greater value
  • Boost admin support
  • Reduce clinic letter turnaround time

Solution

  • Nuance Dragon Medical One
  • Nuance PowerMic Mobile
  • Nuance Professional Services
  • Customer Success Organisation

Results

  • Clinic letter turnaround times reduced from weeks to days and meeting CCG targets
  • >£150,000 saved annually in outsourced transcription costs
  • Costs of medical secretariat reduced by one third
  • Turnaround times on target and improved patient experience

With Dragon Medical speech recognition, the set of notes are done. It has 3 or 4 purposes. The EPR is much easier to look at.


—Dr Robyn Carter‑Wale

Podiatrist

2 days

Turnaround time of clinic letters has reduced from 17 days to just 2 days.

A complete turnaround

In terms of hard targets and cost savings, turnaround time of clinic letters has reduced from 17 days to just 2. This is well within CCG targets. The trust is also saving in excess of £150,000 a year on outsourced transcription costs. Staff costs too have been reduced. Medical secretaries who have left are not replaced and bank and agency costs have been reduced, culminating in a one third reduction in spend on the medical secretariat.

The softer benefits are just as impressive. Now, during outpatient clinics, clinicians are entering their own notes into the electronic patient record at the point of care and creating clinic letters they can give to their patients and send electronically to the GP before the patient leaves the clinic.

Patients benefit from faster, personalised communication and there are few lost or missed appointments. Medical secretaries can now focus on patient contact rather than having to try to get on top of typing a backlog of handwritten notes. The clinicians themselves benefit from knowing they are providing a better level of care to patients and no longer have to spend extra time after clinics catching up on paperwork.


Because Dragon Medical One is delivered via the cloud, it offers much more flexibility.


—Paul Adams

Head of Clinical Information Systems

In their own words

The transformation team have been posting blogs from those experiencing the transformation to keep everyone at Homerton up to date with the progress of outpatient projects. The following are a few extracts from the blogs as the outpatient transformation has progressed.

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