Welcome to the first installment in our series
Although it’s
often just a single sheet of paper or digital document, the referring physician’s
final report is among the most crucial factors affecting your referral stream
and the profitability of your practice. If your reports are not timely, precise, well-organized
and geared towards your referrers’ preferences, then your entire medical
business can suffer. Reports can make a major difference in the success or
failure of your practice.
So not
surprisingly, a robust reporting platform powered by advanced speech
recognition is vitally important in the current competitive healthcare
environment. If you're not leveraging
all of today's innovative tools, your competition may have an unfair
advantage—and not just on paper.
All speech
recognition and reporting solutions are not created equal. Evaluate systems, and look for key features
and functionalities. The best systems will
enhance your own practice’s workflow by providing the flexibility to support each
physician’s reporting preferences through customized protocols, terminology
unique to your specialty and practice, easy embedding of key images and more. Faster workflow accelerates report generation
and results communication to your referrers. Through advanced templating, a good system
will also support reports that are more precise, consistent and
easy-to-understand. That’s another major
benefit for your referrers.
Most medical
practices will benefit by minimizing the time and expenses of maintaining and
upgrading a reporting platform. A cloud
solution like IDS Voice2Dox will shift this responsibility to your vendor and
enable easy anywhere, anytime availability of transcribed reports. Industry leading Voice2Dox also offers a host
of important productivity-boosting features for any medical practice. Many of these have extra value for physicians
who work in multiple locations or provide virtual consultation or teleradiology
services.
Today, a state-of-the-art
reporting platform should include:
· Support
for the medical speech recognition engine—or engines—of your choice. Some practices prefer the flexibility of cloud-based
technology, while others will choose an onsite solution. The best engines will help your practice ensure
overall accuracy and correct medical terminology. Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2 is among
the best solutions for local installation, while SpeechAnywhere is a high
performance cloud-based recognition engine. Voice2Dox supports both, and will offer
compatibility with a full range of additional voice engines in the future.
· A
broad selection of easily customizable report templates specific to your
practice area to enhance reporting efficiency.
· Powerful
and robust template management capabilities to ensure easy access to all
templates throughout the practice or department. This not only speeds workflow but provides
all physicians with access to consistent reporting features—leading to
standardized reports.
· Roaming
profiles that deliver the same familiar work environment in any location,
whether office, hospital or home, and universal PACS worklist compatibility to
assure appropriate prioritization of exam reading.
· For
teleradiologists—support for simultaneous communication with multiple PACS and
other image viewing solutions on the same workstation. This will enable use of a single familiar
reporting and robust speech recognition platform with all client image viewing
platforms for familiar, ultra-fast workflow.
· Easy
Crop and Paste addition of thumbnail
images. Often, a picture really is worth
a thousand words for your referral base.
· Automated
reminders about exam specifics such as modality, types of studies, and imaging
location to speed workflow.
· Floating
checklists of key report content based on modality and exam type.
· Advanced
editing functions such as drag and drop repositioning of phrases, and report
availability on mobile devices for revisions on-the-fly.
· Built-in
Critical Findings workflow to ensure compliance, while allowing workflow to
progress.
· Physician
portal for remote signing, editing and archiving.
· Automated
routine sharing, including public, mentor-follower and explicit share.
· Automated
distribution to ensure reports reach their intended recipients quickly and
efficiently. Choose a system that caters
to physician preference with delivery via email, fax, remote printing,
referring physician portal and EMR interface.
· Analytics
to track productivity and eliminate bottlenecks in your workflow and radiology
team.
· Affordable
transaction-based pricing.
Quite simply, if you depend on referrals, it’s smart to focus
on your reporting and to cater to your referrers!
