The Rockingham Memorial Hospital (RMH) in Harrisonburg, VA, has successfully used speech recognition from Nuance for the clinical documentation.
Using the eScription and Dragon Medical speech recognition solutions, RMH has realized productivity gains of 91 percent. Clinicians using the hospital’s EHR system can document directly into the EHR thanks to speech recognition.

Speech recognition technology is now advanced enough for the needs of healthcare. “Any healthcare organization that has not tried speech recognition or has not tried it in recent years, now is the time,” said Mike Rozmus, vice president, information services and CIO, Rockingham Memorial Hospital. “Physicians need a variety of documentation tools, including speech recognition, to enable them to work efficiently and to support the creation of high-quality, electronic health records. By deploying speech recognition tools we have realized improved patient documentation, which in turn facilitates improved patient care. At the same time we have increased physician satisfaction with our transcription services and reduced costs. Speech recognition will help us save $600,000 in the first year of use.”

The hospital deployed the speech recognition platform in 2009, to replace previous medical transcription solutions. Clinicians now benefit from improved documentation quality - most reports are available in no longer than 20 minutes. In addition to eScription, emergency room clinicians use Dragon Medical to create medical notes in real time. The doctors can dictate to create medical records quickly. “All RMH physicians now use Nuance’s speech recognition to document patient encounters,” said Dr. Robert Underwood, physician and chief medical information officer, Rockingham Memorial Hospital. “With eScription, there is zero disruption to physicians’ workflow, yet efficiency gains in the background speed the time it takes for patient reports to become final in the EHR; whereas Dragon Medical provides the option for real-time documentation. Depending on physician workflow preference, as well as on the priority of the information being documented, I believe both scenarios of speech recognition are helping our team work more efficiently. This, in turn, allows us to create and share patient information faster than ever before.”

For more information about Rockingham Memorial Hospital, please visit http://www.rmhonline.com. Additional information on Nuance’s health care IT solutions can be found at http://www.nuance.com/healthcare/products.