Castletown Medical Centre located on the Isle of Man serves over 4000 patients across Castletown and surrounding areas with 4 GPs using EMIS Web.

The problem

The doctors at Castletown were typing up their own consultations and referral letters.  Due to the limited amount of time between patients, this was becoming increasingly difficult, thus generating a backlog which could only be dealt with at the end of the working day.

They were looking for a solution to reduce the time they were having to spend on administration at the end of the working day. GPs were also becoming increasingly frustrated as they wanted to spend more time with their patients without creating a backlog of administrative tasks.

The solution

Debbie, the Practice Manager, decided that it was time to try out the Dragon Medical Speech Recognition  software, which Crescendo had previously made her aware of. She contacted Tony Walsh (Business Development Manager at Crescendo) and asked if she could set up a trial system.

Shortly after, Tony visited Castletown to set up and train all the doctors on the Speech Recognition software. The GPs were impressed that they could dictate directly into their Clinical System, EMIS Web and also into their templates by creating commands and acronyms to help with repetitive typing.

The GPs and Debbie were all blown away by the capability of the software saying it was going to save them so much time on administrative tasks.

Putting it to the test

Over the course of the trial, the GPs found that they were able to complete their administrative tasks between seeing patients much quicker, resulting in no backlog of tasks at the end of clinics. This has allowed, in some cases, for the doctors to take additional telephone consultations and spend more time with their patients in surgery. They also like that they can dictate their notes during the consultation, including dictating their Read Codes, whilst maintaining eye contact with the patient.

The Outcome

A couple of months after the implementation on Crescendo’s Speech Recognition, we got in touch with Debbie Longan to see how they were getting on:

“The Medical Speech Recognition has equated to a time saving of up to 1 hour per day for each doctor which has directly benefitted the patients.”  Debbie Longan – Practice Manager.