How can Doctors save time on Medical Documentation

Sharjeel Siddique
4 min readMar 30, 2019

Doctors require a sheer amount of dedication to look after a patient well being. I mean that’s what the job title entails, helping people with health issues and they seem to have a strong proclivity towards it.

If you have a Practice based out of USA, then you are mandated by law to maintain reports of your patients. Reports are maintained for the transparency in the communication between the patient and the doctor. It may sound like a lot of work but these are vitally important in analyzing a symptom or tracing back to what medication or procedure was agreed upon.

The Documentation in Health care was introduced to address accountability and enforce the rights of patients. This also comes at a responsibility to protect the confidentiality and security of healthcare information.

Keeping reports as a frame of reference is a good way for a doctor to identify and address the concern in consultation and contribute productively to the conversation. Some ideal scenarios can also help in suggesting appropriate medication and procedures.

I didn’t open up this article to talk about why documentation is necessary and helpful. You probably know this already. The Health care system in the USA is stringently monitored, and a significant amount of scrutiny is involved in a doctor’s practice to minimize the risk of failure on patients.

It is been reported that one-third of doctor’s time is consumed in the creation of medical records. There is another entire industry dedicated to saving doctors from typing; Transcriptionist. Transcriptionist produces medical records while adhering to medical standards. That’s all great until you realize such offerings comes at a hefty price and the pain of managing a human resource.

With the advent of speech recognition technology, doctors can create records without hitting a single keystroke. There are many speech recognition softwares that are designed to help doctors in minimizing effort and time.

Of late, I have been playing around a few such dictation software. Why was I looking for a medical dictation software? That’s another story for another time. My prime motive was to explore which one is the best and affordable. I quickly realized some of the medical dictation software are burning a deep hole in your pocket. A lot of these companies are being able to do so due to consumer lack of awareness of other offerings.

The most famous of them all is Dragon and I want to be honest with you. They are pretty impressing. If you do believe spending good money in organizing your medical records helps you by a very large margin then go ahead. It will be a good decision. However, keep in mind that Dragon is under a large billion dollar corporation banner and you may experience delays in customer support.

I’m not going to list out other hundred speech recognition software cause honestly most of them do the same thing. I have tried many and most of them are in pricing range of Dragon with less accuracy. So, if y you don’t care about shelling out money then Dragon is your savior. Keep in mind, Dragon can get very expensive as you scale.

But, in my case, my primary concern was pricing and accuracy. My belief was I may not be able to find a solution with the desired accuracy if I don’t compromise on price. The challenge was to pay little and get the best out of it.

So, On what product did my pursuit to find the most affordable and accurate medication speech recognition ended? Honestly, It depends on your specific situation but I would, however, suggest that if you are truly looking to save time in documentation without giving away an arm and a leg then I would strongly suggest VoiceBoxMD. VoiceBoxMD came as a surprise to me, specifically, their pricing structure. It’s pretty simple and they don’t tie you with lucrative contracts.

Medical vocabulary is also well fed and updated regularly. It is a HIPAA-covered entity which means it implements multiple safeguards to protect sensitive personal and health information.

The Pay as you go model ensures we are not chained to a product for a long time and we can decide to leave if we ever feel problem using it or found it not relevant to our practice anymore.

A big take away of using VoiceBoxMD was their offering is also available on mobile which is a huge boost in productivity as it helps you to create or view records on the go; that’s just icing on the cake right there.

My analysis in observing doctors using voice dictation software is it’s a huge added bonus in time and productivity. A lot of them fear using it due to the sense it may involve a person with decent knowledge of technology to operate but trust me these tools are fairly designed to be operated by anyone. You just need to hang your around it.

As a doctor, you need to save time and attend more patients. Give it a go to a Voice Dictation Software and you will feel a whole lot of difference in your practice. Besides, it’s not that expensive.

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