Fallon Clinic's Dr. Larry Garber on EHR + voice recognition

The Fallon Clinic in Central Massachusetts has invested heavily in electronic health records. Fallon's deployment of Epic has been successful. However, cost-savings projections on transcription were not being met, because many physicians preferred to continue dictating their notes for transcription rather than typing them directly into Epic.Fallon decided to study the use of voice recognition software in conjunction with its EHR, in the hopes of weaning physicians away from traditional transcription.In this podcast interview, Dr. Larry Garber, Fallon's Medical Director for Informatics, describes Fallon's experience with Dragon Medical speech recognition software, which was used in the study. Among the key findings:

• Turnaround time for the note to appear in the EHR dropped from 4 days to 46 minutes, which had ripple effects in improving clinical workflow
• Physician satisfaction with note generation increased substantially
• The average quality of the medical record improved 26 percent, based on peer review
• Net savings of $7000 per physician per year were realized