by
Keith Loria, Reporter | February 19, 2011
From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
ChartWise Medical Systems offers software that helps doctors properly code and use phrases that will ensure optimized reimbursements.
“Doctors are being evaluated and graded on how well they participate in these programs and unfortunately, some hospitals are penalizing their full-time doctors for patient charts where they didn’t get as precise as they needed to be in their documentation,” says Jon Elion, a cardiologist and founder of ChartWise Medical Systems. “I hate the penalty idea and some are offering incentives for doing the most complete job and in that situation a [physician] would be advised to use our software.”
For instance, if a doctor used the phrase “unstable angina” it knows to translate that to “intermediate coronary syndrome” and the doctor and hospital will still be credited with the procedure they did, even though it may not have been initially said in the dictation.
Training time
Speech recognition software generally requires little training—it can take as little as 30 minutes to train the software and a couple of hours to train users. This increases its acceptance among clinicians.
“Speech recognition software does not require a major retraining of physicians since most are already using or have used some type of dictation,” Fallati says. “Speech recognition software will, in most cases, integrate into electronic medical record systems, should the practice decide to upgrade in the future. It’s also been shown that speech recognition makes a practice function in ‘real time,’ since speech recognition files can be dropped to paper if needed and faxed the same day as the patient is seen.”
Most companies recommend 2-3 hours per physician of training on the software and the key to success is follow-up.
On the go
The movement toward more mobile offerings designed for physician interface and documentation is the trend among speech recognition vendors.
Belton says Nuance has approximately 35,000 physicians in the United States who are using iPhones to look up something in their medical records.
“They simply speak the medication or the disease treatment plan into their phone and it instantly comes back with medical reference information,” Belton says. “The iPhone is clearly exploding in the health care space.”
M*Modal has also extended its speech recognition product to the iPhone and is seeing a rise in physicians using this.
The final word
Belton sees two scenarios unfolding for physicians and EHRs. Either physicians will continue to use traditional dictation methods, using the EHR for only certain functions, or they will adopt speech recognition technology, basically ending the costs associated with transcription. Those costs could run as much as $20,000 a year.
