Case Studies

The Situation

This North Carolina-based family practice and extended-hour urgent care center was growing busier by the day. With five doctors and four physician’s assistants—each with his or her own panel of patients—the center’s two full-time and one part-time transcriptionists were having a hard time keeping up with the volume.

In the office, dictation work started accumulating. Soon, reports were backed up by two or even three weeks, a fact that increased stress and caused major problems when charts were incomplete—but the patient was returning for a second visit. The transcriptionists were working as fast as they could, but they were still falling behind.

The Solution

Fayetteville Family Medical Care contacted Transcription Solutions and asked us to help them catch up. We brought them up to speed by bringing in our own transcriptionists, who manually transcribed dictations. But we all realized this wasn’t a viable long-term solution.

After learning more about M*Modal’s speech understanding technology, Fayetteville Family Medical Care decided to take the leap and give it a try. At first, only a couple of providers signed on to use the system. But it quickly became obvious that with no routine disruption, no start-up costs, and a high rate of accuracy, the Transcription Solution system was working incredibly well.

The Result

Right now, every single one of Fayetteville Family Medical Care’s providers has made the switch to Transcription Solutions. They’re incredibly pleased—not only with the accelerated turnaround rate on charts—but also with the seamlessness of the technology. Without requiring a routine change, many reports return the same day they’re sent out.

The cost savings are also impressive. Now, 100% of all transcriptions are completed in-house, reducing the cost of outsourcing. The center hasn’t needed to make any expensive new hires; they’ve simply increased the productivity of their existing transcriptionists. Perhaps most impressively, the per-line cost has been cut almost in half.

In Their Own Words

Alice Kugler, Administrator, Fayetteville Family Medical Care:

“At first, we only brought a couple of our doctors and physicians assistants online—because we wanted to make sure the system worked. And Transcription Solutions definitely worked. There’s no more backlog of charts, and same-day turnaround is the norm. Our transcription costs have almost been cut in half.

The transition has been incredibly smooth, because our practitioners didn’t have to do anything. Honestly, most of them didn’t even know we’d made a change—until they realized their charts were coming back to them so much faster. Now, all of our practitioners have switched to Transcription Solutions.”

The Situation

1.4 million. That’s how many radiology studies The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center handles in a single year.

As a prominent healthcare system and a renowned academic medical center, UPMC consistently ranks as one of the best hospitals in the United States (according to U.S. News & World Reports). It consists of 19 hospitals, an extensive network of care sites and multiple state-of-the-art imaging centers.

UPMC had already moved to a filmless/paperless imaging system. But with so many radiology reports to gather, they still found themselves plagued by long turnaround times and a backlog of reports. They discovered the transcription process was simply not keeping pace.

The Solution

UPMC served as the testing ground for M*Modal, who created the advanced technology that now benefits Transcription Solutions’ clients. After several years of feedback and modifications, M*Modal successfully built a seamless system that could be implemented without upsetting a physician’s schedule. And yet, it was powerful enough to actually understand conversational speech.

“Traditionally, addition of speech recognition to radiology is a very disruptive event—it changes the physician's workflow and training the system takes time away from reviewing images and reporting. That is terrible for radiologists,” said Barton Branstetter, MD, clinical director of neuroradiology and associate director of radiology informatics at UPMC. “When we first turned on speech recognition with M*Modal, most of the radiologists were unaware that a change had taken place, because dictation continued to flow through transcription for edit—the only real difference to the radiologist was that reports came back much faster.”

The Result

Today, M*Modal technology has transformed the UPMC radiology department. Success is so great, 100% of physicians at all imaging sites use the technology. Other departments are asking to go online with the system, because they see how the accuracy of reports has improved drastically in just a short period of time.

The entire process has also sped up. UPMC reports that productivity has remarkably increased—to the point where physicians can review the entire day’s dictations before going home for the night. Turning transcriptionists into editors has reduced physician sign-off time by 50%.

In Their Own Words

Barton Branstetter, MD, clinical director of neuroradiology and associate director of radiology informatics at UPMC:

“Recognition accuracy has improved so much that we now measure accuracy based on the number reports with an error, rather than the traditional method of measuring the number of errors per report. The longer the system has been in place, the more willing I am to self-edit because the results from M*Modal are increasingly accurate without any explicit training exercises.”

Carl Fuhrman, MD, professor of radiology, chief of the division of thoracic radiology at UPMC:

“I was not a proponent of speech recognition, as I had spoken with colleagues at other hospitals who were unhappy with their speech recognition system, so it was with some reluctance that I began using [M*Modal]. However, the quality of the draft report was high from the beginning and the system quickly improved the department's productivity such that I am very happy using it.

It has had tremendous impact on our department ... with the ever increasing accuracy and how quickly we are able to turn around reports, I cannot imagine doing it any other way.”