Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 4.2
Integration of Speech Recognition into Clinical Documentation
rising healthcare costs, medical errors and decreasing patient safety. Its EHR is
called PrimeSUITE®. Fig.
4.2
shows the integration of M*Modal's speech recogni-
tion (the speech controls are at the top) into its documentation process. In this exam-
ple, the physician first imported the past medical history from the patient's face
sheet into the new note and then dictated the chief complaint and the history of pres-
ent illness. M*Modal software recognized what information belongs in those two
sections of the chart and placed them accordingly.
There are numerous other places where dictation can go directly into structured
forms such as the patient's cover sheet. Dictation process management is also auto-
mated so that the resulting text is routed to an internal or external resource for
verification and the correction of any mistakes. PrimeSUITE isn't yet converting
text to structured clinical concepts but Greenway says that this is their next step.
Integrated Workflow and Process Management:
I've repeatedly touched on inte-
grated workflow and process management as an important issue for actually increas-
ing provider productivity through automation. As discussed earlier, the approach is
commonplace in manufacturing, retailing and other industries. Finding good exam-
ples of this thinking in electronic medical record systems isn't as easy as it should
be. Here are two companies that had it among their founding principles.
Medical Informatics Engineering (MIE)
was founded in Fort Wayne, IN by
Doug Horner in 1995 as a health information exchange including a clinical reposi-
tory mostly for lab data. This was at the very beginning of the Internet and it is
remarkable that the company was web-based from the outset and even provided the
needed network connectivity to their clients' offices. Over a series of years their
offering evolved into an EHR starting with high speed digital storage and manage-
ment of transcribed documents. The next phase was to replace paper charts using
