Case study: Children's Medical Group

Dr. Summers describes himself as a “blue-collar user” of speech recognition, moving from paper to technology, and as a staunch advocate for independent practices. When Children’s Medical Group began its transition to its electronic health record (EHR), the clinicians appreciated the technology’s efficiency by way of macros, order sets, visit types and smart sets; but it felt like something was missing.

“It was a lot of clicking and a cookiecutter sort of experience, and the piece missing for me was how to tell the story of what was going on with my patients,” says Dr. Summers.

While it was important for the practice to have objective, mineable discrete information in notes, Dr. Summers and the team needed a more contextual narrative to understand the complete picture of a child.

That’s where 3M™ M*Modal Fluency Direct comes in, offering Dr. Summers and team the ability to tell a child’s story thoroughly and completely.

With 3M Fluency Direct, Dr. Summers quickly found he could communicate his notes three to four times faster than his counterparts typing. The ability to move quickly – 150 to 160 words a minute – was key, as was his dramatically faster documentation and closure rate.

“The beauty of what I am able to do is move macros by voice,” he says. “I can move around the chart by voice, so I am doing less clicking. I move a lot more gracefully through the chart and through my documentation with voice. I think that has been proven out by everyone else who has adopted it in my practice.”

Additionally, the technology recognizes different specialties for the language it is going to hear.

“One of the clinicians at Children’s Medical Group has a fairly strong accent and she has had no problem dictating into it,” says Dr. Summers. “I can speak at a very low volume and it picks up what I am saying. Those aspects are a homerun.”

Dr. Summers says he’s at least 30 percent faster than before with speech recognition.

“You can take that and extrapolate that to quality of life – I clearly have more free time,” he says. “There is no question that the concept of burnout is real. There’s no question that this improves your time spent and opens you up to more opportunity.” As he and other leaders in the profession look to battle burnout, Dr. Summers believes speech recognition plays a key role in the development of richer patient content.

“With the technology, I feel better about what I have accomplished,” he says. “It also takes me away from feeling all I did was click and hit discrete data points so it could be mined. There’s the ability to mine the data that you dictate. So, will it affect burnout from your clinicians? Absolutely.”