NoteSwift Takes Medical Dictation to the Next Level
NoteSwift is on a mission to make it easier for doctors to enter patient information into their electronic healthcare records by integrating with several of the leading EHR products and dictation software, like Nuance Communications' Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical Practice Edition.
NoteSwift, which recently announced NoteSwift for the Allscripts TouchWorks EHR, acts as the bridge between the EHR and Dragon Medical, interpreting the speech information either as commands that a clinician can use to navigate the TouchWorks Note module, or as content to be inserted into data fields within the electronic record.
The company's latest product upgrade, the new SwiftNav technology, helps doctors more quickly navigate through their EHR programs by eliminating the need to click through multiple screens or check boxes. Doctors using the program simply say the name of the section of the note or item to be selected and NoteSwift automatically takes them there. Doctors can dictate both structured and narrative text, and NoteSwift is able to discern which parts of the dictated speech will be automatically entered into which specific fields.
Wayne Crandall, president and CEO of NoteSwift, says the product significantly reduces the time a provider spends creating patient notes. According to company research, entering information into a typical EHR program after a patient visit typically takes doctors 18 to 20 minutes and 100 mouse clicks. Using dictation, that is cut to about nine and a half minutes and 85 mouse clicks. With NoteSwift, it takes about three minutes and five mouse clicks, Crandall says.
"When you look at that over the course of a single day, that means that a doctor can spend more time with his patients or see more patients in a day because he's not spending as much time in the EHR," he says.
Crandall expects NoteSwift to not only increase doctors' productivity but also to increase adoption of EHRs in general.
"Making EHRs easier to use and cutting down on the time it takes to create patient notes is critical for the successful adoption of EHRs," he says. "With NoteSwift, we can reduce mouse clicks by 90 percent, which streamlines medical speech recognition."
But Crandall is quick to point out that NoteSwift is not a competitor to Nuance's Dragon product. "We're a value-add on top of Dragon," he says. "We're taking the results of the speech recognition and making it actionable."
Currently, NoteSwift supports several Allscripts products, including TouchWorks, Professional EHR, Practice Management, and Sunrise Acute Care solutions. The company about a year ago began working with Aprima Medical Software, and also works with Amazing Charts software. It is compatible with just about every medical specialty, Crandall says.
NoteSwift, in fact, was founded by Dr. Chris Russell, a neurologist who also has a degree in computer programming. "It stems from his own challenges with EHRs," Crandall says. "He developed it for himself, and we took it beyond that."