Dragon Medical helps improve clinical note quality

The University of Tennessee Medical Center reduces documentation costs by 70%.

Comprehensive and intuitive clinical documentation, embraced by all specialties.

University of Tennessee Success Story

Company profile

The University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville is doing the hard work required to improve care coordination and transition into the world of value-based care.

Getting there was difficult, however. Physicians were spending a great deal of time documenting care—and they were using paper as well as costly and inefficient dictation/transcription processes to document H&Ps, operative notes, consult notes, and progress notes.

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We needed to build a foundation to deliver high-quality, coordinated care. Value-based care brings its own challenges. We now have the right foundation with Dragon Medical and Cerner’s Dynamic Documentation.

Dr. James Keel III
CMIO
The University of Tennessee Medical Center

Challenge

  • Eliminate paper notes
  • Reduce transcription costs
  • Reduce documentation time
  • Lacks foundation for better care coordination and value-based care

Solution

  • Dragon® Medical Network Edition
  • Nuance Professional Services

Results

  • Documentation cost and utilization reduced by 70%
  • Nearly 100% physician adoption rate
  • Documentation time cut by 46%
  • 90% of H&P and consult notes documented with Dragon Medical
  • Foundation built for better care coordination and value-based care

Background

The University of Tennessee Medical Center is a Level I Trauma Center with 609 licensed beds. The facility’s surgeons perform 26,000 procedures each year, during which time its emergency room hosts 86,000 patient visits. The medical center employs 850 medical staff and allied health professionals.

With a paper-driven documentation workflow, coordinating patient care had been challenging. There was no way for a clinician to pull up a patient record in the EHR to determine their history or to view daily progress notes— and that would make the transition to value-based care almost impossible.

On go-live day with Dragon® Medical Network Edition and Cerner’s Dynamic Documentation™, all 515 of the medical center’s inpatient providers began documenting care electronically. The number of notes in the EHR surged from a handful to 1,400 a day. Since go-live, residual paper documents are scanned into the EHR by HIM twice a day.

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