Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group reduces transcription costs by 90%, increases EHR adoption.
Company profile
With 400 physicians and 1,700 staff members, Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group is one of the largest, most comprehensive medical groups in San Diego County. Each of the group’s 19 locations offers primary and specialty care, laboratory, physical therapy, radiology, pharmacy and urgent care services.
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Richard Gwinn, MD
Director of Urgent Care
Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group
Challenge
- Replace inefficient, labor-intensive paper process
- Eliminate $900,000 annual transcription expenses
- Improve documentation quality
- Jumpstart adoption of Enterprise EHR
Solution
- Deploy Dragon Medical Network Edition
- Speech-enable documentation
- Automate implementation to reduce costs
- Use physician ‘champions’
Results
- 400 physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners using Dragon Medical Network Edition
- $900,000 annual transcription cost savings
- Increased electronic progress notes from 6,183 to 19,020
- Reduced paper charts by 98,000 monthly
Background
Prior to implementing Dragon® Medical Network Edition, providers at Sharp Rees-Stealy dictated or handwrote documentation. Transcribing dictated notes was expensive and took two to three days. Handwriting was faster, but often illegible. The group implemented Allscripts’ Enterprise™ EHR to automate documentation, but populating it required too much work, so many physicians continued using expensive transcription services. Sharp Rees-Stealy decided to speech-enable its Enterprise EHR with Dragon Medical Network Edition from Nuance Healthcare.
Together, these solutions would permit the group to create complete, comprehensive, real-time notes—while reducing transcription costs.