Ponteland Medical Group improves patient care with speech

It is easy to forget that it is not just large companies that are facing these challenges, but smaller ones too are also under pressure to review how they can make their organisations operate more efficiently, without compromising the quality of service they deliver. Success stories are out there though, as Ponteland Medical Group proves.

Covering the Newcastle upon Tyne area of north England, Ponteland Medical Group treats approximately 11,000 patients annually in its three surgeries. The quality of patient care is the key priority and the Ponteland group regularly assesses its working practices to ensure the highest standards of patient care. A key component of patient care is the amount of time that Ponteland’s GPs can spend in a patient consultation. During the course of a day, some of this one-on-one time was being eroded by the need for the GP to proof read patient letters transcribed by the Group’s secretaries.

The Group established that for the GPs to be able to spend more time with their patients, they would have to spend less time proofing patient letters and referral notes. To facilitate this change, the Group decided to overhaul the workflow process, which formerly involved GPs dictating to tape-based dictation devices, passing the tapes to the secretaries for transcription and, after transcription, sending the letters back to the GP for approval.

To free doctors’ time, increase their productivity and allow more time with the patients, the Group decided to implement a speech recognition-based workflow process, using Dragon Medical from Nuance. With speech recognition technology underpinning the new workflow process, creating patient letters became much easier.

GPs now open a document and are set to dictate the letter or patient referral notes using Dragon Medical. Once the letter is completed, it is sent to the secretarial team and placed in the appropriate document template and format. It is here that a major improvement compared to the previous workflow is realised: the time-consuming stage of sending the letter back to the doctor for correction has been removed. The benefits are two-fold. This frees doctors’ time so they can now spend more time with each patient, while a further benefit to patients is that because referral letters and patient reports can be created and dispatched more quickly, patient treatment can begin much sooner.

Dragon Medical has also had a positive impact on the secretaries’ productivity. For instance, during the week of 16 – 20 May, 257 letters were dictated into Dragon Medical. 92% of those letters were processed within 1-2 days. Previously, using the old tape-based system, this start-to-end process could take up to seven days to clear the tapes. The secretaries can now spend more time attending to patients when booking appointments and answering calls more promptly. This is a clear example that boosting productivity and efficiency needn’t compromise quality of service or patient care at a time of budget cuts.