Webmedx Allows Doctors to Dictate Reports

Webmedx, a medical transcription service provider that supplies speech recognition and analytics, released information about the first hospitals that have implemented its technologies in an effort to use front-end speech recognition solutions.

Currently these systems, which record and capture information, are being used at several sites. The particular solution allows doctors to document using voice recognition; they are then able to self-edit, which Webmedx says reduces their work costs by 60 percent for each transcribed report.

“Every document created using front-end speech recognition saves the organization money, while also keeping physicians in total control of their workflows,“ says Chris Cashwell, vice president of Webmedx, in a statement. Also, the data from these reports can be codified and mined and can subsequently be uploaded in electronic health records (EHRs).

“Speech technology keeps what is familiar to doctors, dictating,” states John Umekubo, chief information officer at St. Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco and a Webmedx customer. “We have the capability to do our documentation on the computer, but that requires typing and many are not very good at it...but we are good at dictating,” Umekubo said in a statement.

According to the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI), there are almost 1.2 billion clinical records created in the United States annually and 60 percent of them are documented via traditional dictation and transcription. However, this new technology allows other possibilities for the information since it can be captured by users.

In hopes of providing further options, Webmedx’s platform, Enterprise5, allows doctors to send reports to an editor using a back-end speech recognition or allows them to dictate the report for a transcriptionist who can then complete the document. These services are made available without licensing fees, so doctors can work within a single workflow.<