eScription

Maine Medical Center

Improving Efficiency in the Face of Rising Transcription Demands

Challenge

Maine Medical Center is a 606-bed teaching hospital serving southern and central Maine and a major referral center for northern New England. It is also the largest hospital in the state. Several years ago, due to growing transcription demand across medical groups in its multi-location campus, the hospital found that its existing transcription system was strained. Staffing issues, recruitment challenges, and rising labor costs for medical transcriptionists (MTs) were making it more and more difficult for Maine Medical's HIM Department to handle the increasing demand for transcription services while controlling costs.

"As our volume grew, we needed to find a way to increase the productivity of our transcription process," stated John Avedian, HIM Director at Maine Medical Center. "I was open to the idea of speech recognition technology that truly valued the transcriptionists and did not set out to make them obsolete."

Solution

In 2000, Maine Medical Center implemented software from eScription, Inc., a company that is focused exclusively on improving transcription productivity for large healthcare organizations. eScription's Computer Aided Medical Transcription (CAMT) software uses intelligent background speech recognition to turn clinicians' spoken dictations into formatted draft documents that MTs quickly review and edit, often doubling productivity over traditional transcription.

The Medical Center's staff of 17.5 FTEs edits the draft documents, with overnight and overflow editing handled by an outsourced transcription company. As editors, MTs typically complete the transcription process twice as fast as they would have if typing documents from scratch. This productivity increase helped Maine Medical Center both handle the additional transcription demand and save costs, by reducing the volume of outsourced transcription. The Medical Center was able to centralize all outpatient transcription across the system and the document quality has remained as good as, or better, than under the previous systems.

What's more, the hospital has achieved these results without interfering with clinicians' workflow. Jefferson Howe, MS, CMT, Transcription and Chart Completion Manager at Maine Medical Center commented, "Maine Medical Center clinicians did not have to adjust their speaking patterns or explicitly train the software in order to use it."

Today, eScription software is processing dictations from more than 1000 clinicians at Maine Medical Center with over 80% of the work being edited versus traditionally transcribed. The solution has organization-wide application and supports numerous specialties and work types. "We are processing more than 60 work types for over 15 different locations and customer/business entities across the Medical Center. This ranges from the traditional inpatient hospital reports to our psychiatric facility, to all our clinics and recently to our physician office practices," commented Avedian.

In-house and remote MTs are trained on the eScription transcription product, which provides an MT interface based on Microsoft Word®. A variety of productivity features such as shortcut keys and audio controls facilitate the editing process. "The system is easy to use, functional in design, and requires relatively little training before an employee is productive," said Howe, who is also a past president of the American Association for Medical Transcription (AAMT), currently the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI).

The flexible document distribution capabilities of the eScription software enable faster response times when discharging or transferring patients, and free up Transcription Coordinators from overseeing routine distribution requests. For example, records are now automatically faxed to out-of-state clinicians, or printed directly to the patient's floor, without manual intervention. Of the 1,000 faxes that were sent daily through the previous system, as many as 200-300 would result in errors and have to be resent. With eScription software, the reliability of fax distribution has improved by 90 percent.

An eScription installation team helped Maine Medical 'hit the ground running' by defining interfaces and document distribution rules, and by addressing the hospital's formatting requirements right from the start. In addition, eScription provided on-site training for MTs to accelerate the productivity gains they could achieve.

The CAMT solution is dynamically integrated with Maine Medical Center's existing medical information systems through secure, standards-based interfaces. "The eScription team was very responsive to our requests. They understand the hospital environment and worked with us as partners to reach our goals," added Avedian.

Results

"The financial advantages are compelling. With eScription, Maine Medical Center has successfully reduced costs of medical transcription, while gaining efficiencies in the clinical documentation process enterprise-wide."
— Stephen Rosenfeld, CIO

"We have experienced double the productivity compared to regular transcription modalities."
— Jefferson Howe, Transcription and Chart Completion Manager, and past president, AAMT/AHDI.

Today at Maine Medical Center:

• The organization has saved more than $1 million in transcription costs both by reducing the need for outsourcing and by lowering its outsourcing costs. The outsourced budget has been cut in half.
• MTs have achieved a doubling of productivity.
• Overflow management is much improved. An automated reporting feature indicates when the Medical Transcription Service Organization should log-in and begin to work.
• Quality of transcribed reports is enhanced, as documented through an audit process.
• Turnaround time improved.
• 90% fewer faxes fail.
• eScription's web-based solution eliminated software purchases and let the organization replace on-site staff with more remote MTs.
• MTs are happier than ever. In a survey, the majority of respondents said that they would never want to go back to 'the old way.'

Maine Medical Center has a highly efficient, enterprise-wide solution for its transcription demand and all constituencies are happy. Learn more about the complete EditScript solution that is delivering real results to Maine Medical Center in our Products section.

Download the MMC Success Story