What stops Chief Medical Officers from integrating DMO services and how to overcome them
Maintaining pace with the modern demands of healthcare is incredibly challenging. Chief medical officers are tasked with onboarding services, tech, and staff to readily meet these demands in a timely fashion. But the barriers to any form of integration (updating legacy infrastructure) are numerous, creating hesitation before the adoption of new services.
Legacy infrastructure is nothing new, but it goes beyond the types of hardware and software used when servicing patients. It’s also familiarity with old processes and resistance towards updating healthcare workflow. Even if a legacy process is slow and frustrating, it’s known, comfortable, and preferred. Thus, transitioning away from the familiar is – to some – a herculean step. But the demands of medical transcriptions, documentation, and electronic medical records cannot be ignored and require a swift jump into newer, responsive architecture.
Medical officers must then make decisions to create this responsive workflow environment, though are hit with cost concerns and efficiency problems. The same goes for smaller and private medical practices that need to shift away from legacy to better address EMR requirements.
Common physician and healthcare organizational challenges regarding EMRs
It isn’t just workflow or time demands – medical documentation presents a variety of challenges, not all clinicians, organizations, and medical practices are equipped to handle. For instance, not all doctors and medical professionals are fast typists. Others are less familiar with streamlined computer navigation, and these slowdowns add up to hours of lost productivity in the long term. This does not account for system outages or hangups, adding unfortunate complexities into the mix.
The average person typically writes at 40 WPM, and that’s assuming the stream of typing is unbroken by distractions. This quickly turns into hours of post-office paperwork, and that’s to say nothing of potential errors in typing or medical information needing corrections.
What happens with a disorganized EMR workflow?
Of course, we’re only touching the surface. Different workflow complications and challenges as a result of both legacy infrastructure and medical record errors.
First, consider the severity of the error(s). Typographical errors are one thing, erroneous data relating to a patient or their condition is another. If a prescription, condition, or personal info is wrong, it needs remediation, requiring additional time to fix. Charting, therefore, becomes a massive time sink, feeding into organizational issues and even causing severe problems of clinician burnout.
We’ve discussed before how documentation demands and after-hours work creates less satisfaction at work, given healthcare professionals spend time with data and text versus personal time. Unhappiness reduces overall efficiency, creating a vicious cycle of delays. Delays create burnout, burnout creates delays, and so on. The problem can balloon to such a critical state that medical officers must dedicate entire departments to corrections and data remission, sapping hours, budget, and time. Transcription costs inflate and medical organizations with limited capital find themselves struggling to stay afloat.
In other cases, medical organizations onboard scribes or invest in third-party resources, both of which are costly and limited.
Why dictation software matters
Without modernized infrastructure and responsive systems, the burden of paperwork, EMR, and charting demands falls on clinicians. With less available staff support, minutes transform into hours and doctors encounter the exhausting problems we’ve discussed so far. That’s more reason to switch to Dragon Medical One, Nuance’s dictation software designed for healthcare professionals. Clinicians can capture HIPAA-compliant documentation at 160 words per minute, 3-4x the speed of typing, within industry-leading accuracy.
However, we want to focus on the “barriers” of entry regarding DMO along with misconceptions about the process. These are, after all, the factors causing hesitation among medical officers and those tasked with onboarding new infrastructure.
Managing Integration Concerns
Large healthcare organizations have departments dedicated to EMR management and associated data sets (invoices, patient information, corrections, charts). For this, you need frictionless software and apps, seamlessly adding new services into the workflow process with limited disruption. “Disruptive” implementation can be anything from a new program that requires time to learn or upgrading infrastructure forcing periods of downtime and halting productivity.
Dragon Medical One fulfills this role with seamless app installation and startup. Windows-based tablets (like Microsoft Surface) and desktops can easily install the software. When physical microphones aren’t available, clinicians can use their smartphone (with PowerMic Mobile) to capture spoken audio. The cloud-based application utilizes very minimal resources, so it isn’t necessary to invest in newer, costly hardware to run it. There’s no voice training required so physicians can begin using it effectively immediately after installation.
Improving care quality with patients
Shifting away from traditional data entry improves the patient experience. But even before professionals see their patient base, using dictation software to combat burnout dramatically improves the process. Doctors are more attentive to their patients, and patients feel more comfortable dealing with direct communication versus their caretaker shifting attention to type about medical concerns. These small cadences are invaluable and promote a healthier patient-to-doctor relationship.
Furthermore, using efficient dictation software promotes a faster, more positive experience for everyone involved. Reducing executive escalations is a key benefit, and the overall care process is less frustrating with better care, faster turnaround, and accurate records.
Patients will also experience fewer problems. Medical errors require remediation, extra visits, and potential new care to treat incorrect care paths. But when using accurate dictation software, those problems are alleviated.
Common barriers and how we’ve addressed them
Let’s review how Dragon Medical One bypasses the concerns and barriers associated with integrating new software.
- Limited education and training requirements
- No requirements for expensive new hardware installations to run DMO
- Compatible mobile devices can be used with PowerMic Mobile
- Cut infrastructure upkeep costs and reduce or eliminate transcriptionists and scribes
Though switching or adopting new software sounds like a difficult task, apps such as Dragon Medical One are designed with healthcare professionals in mind. Medical officers tasked with introducing new infrastructure should consider dictation software to address the mounting demands of EMR and invoice systems.
For more information about Dragon Medical One, give us a call at 833-341-1411 option 1. Want to try it now? Activate your risk-free trial today!
