Swedish reduces transcription costs, achieves 100% adoption of EMR.
Company profile
Swedish is the largest nonprofit healthcare provider in the Greater Seattle area with five hospital campuses, two ambulatory care centers with ERs, and a network of more than 100 specialty-care and primary care clinics. Roughly 3,000 providers have privileges at Swedish, all using the EpicCare® EMR
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Dr. Tom Wood
Chief Medical Informatics Officer
Swedish, Seattle, WA
Challenge
- Eliminate indecipherable, incomplete documentation
- Achieve 100% EMR adoption
- Maintain patient care and physician satisfaction excellence
Solution
- Deploy EpicCare EMR on the Citrix desktop virtualization platform
- Speech-enable EMR with Dragon Medical Network Edition
Results
- Reduced transcription costs by as much as 50%
- Eliminated turnaround time for notes
- Achieved 100% adoption of EMR
Background
When Swedish moved from paper records to EpicCare,
it mandated that all physicians and providers adopt the
EMR. Swedish is an open medical staff model where a
majority of the 2,000+ affiliated or credentialed physicians
are private practitioners along with more than 900
employed providers, which are part of Swedish. However,
because Swedish does not employ all providers, the IT
department wanted a simple transition that would not
interfere with patient referrals.
In the ED, Swedish encourages documentation to be
completed at the time of admission for that category
of patients—but there is no such requirement for patients
who are discharged. Still, most notes are completed in
a timely manner and routed to the primary care provider
because that timeliness is appreciated as a valuable
component of patient care—not because it’s required.
IT leadership agreed to give physicians numerous options
for entering notes—typing, templates, dictation, and voice
recognition using Dragon Medical Network Edition.