| Dr Raheel Shariff, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, says good medical documentation is crucial when each patient visit includes thorough record taking such as reason for visit, examination findings and amalgamation of the clinical investigations and a treatment plan. He says: “I use Dragon Medical Direct for all aspects of clinical documentation. Dictating clinic notes, surgical reports and everything else. We have moved to a paperless system and the system is an invaluable facet of easing the documentation process.” Accuracy and ease of use for physicians is key to success One of the critical benefits of speech recognition is that it improves the experience for the healthcare professional as well as the patient. Dr Raheel says: “It has made life much easier as the speed of documentation improved significantly, and it was very easy to adapt to. The speech recognition learns your voice intonation, diction and phrases with time. This significantly reduces errors in documentation which might be encountered with dictation that is manually typed up by admin staff who are new to your unique speech delivery.” Chief Medical Officer Dr. Emad Sagr says “Real time, readily accessible information at the point of care plays a key role in the ability of the IMC to ensure high quality, safe care and digitalization is vital for this. Among the benefits of being able to access information quickly is the generation of medical reports for patients. Traditionally, reports would take several days to be typed up, but the technology means they can be generated within a few minutes.” Using speech recognition also achieves greater accuracy and less need to revisit documentation to correct it. The center assesses the accuracy and quality of the system against how many corrections need to be made on completion of the document. Dr Raheel says: “It’s highly efficient and very few typos need manual correction. This is negligible compared to previous modes of dictation.” Project manager Hanadi Baajajah says the system has enabled the transformation and automation of the entire workflow of physicians, increased the completeness and accuracy of clinical documentation and reduced the backlog of letters and referrals, as well the turn-around time of clinical documentation. “The use of the system has enabled us to put the patient at the center of care.” — Hanadi Baajajah, Project Manager International Medical Center Saudi Arabia In addition to better patient care and experience the system has also had financial benefits for the center. Mr Siddiqui says: “Speech recognition can certainly reduce documentation costs. Saving healthcare professionals time, standardizing documentation, reducing documentation errors, all leads to save costs which can’t be measured directly or reflected on patient’s bills.” Mr Siddiqui adds that hospital has seen reduced costs for scribes and transcriptionists. The center is now aiming to implement Dragon Medical Direct across the whole setting with healthcare professionals using it every single time to document notes. Speech recognition combined with AI can also bring other benefits through the use of data analytics. Mr Siddiqui says: “I think speech recognition with AI will further enable our caregivers to analyze data at documentation level, which seemed impossible a few years back. AI tools can fetch relevant information from notes and can help caregivers in providing meaningful insights which are helpful for the patients. For the future, I think partnering, AI, ML and NLP will further enhance the documentation experience and will help the caregivers to get better insights from these types of tools.” Learn how Dragon Medical Direct can help your organization to improve care. | 
