When it comes to learning how to make your medical practice more efficient, many medical practices look for ways to cut costs on clerical work. One area to look at is if you are using a transcription service. Getting the most out of your service is crucial to justifying its cost. That begins with learning some simple dictation tips.
For most small practices, the ideal solution is speech recognition software. However, many practices are hesitant to move on from the old fashioned method of having a typist. Whether it’s a third party transcription service or someone in-house.
Get Prepared
Before beginning the actual dictation process, it’s important to ensure that you have adequately prepared yourself. This is true whether you use speech recognition software or transcription services.
First, familiarize yourself with your dictation equipment. Ensure that you know how to correctly use your device. This way you don’t find yourself having to stop repeatedly.
If you’re having trouble with your device, you can often find the manual on the manufacturer’s website.
Second, ensure that you have all necessary paperwork organized in front of you. You don’t want to have to keep stopping and starting again because you need to keep getting up to find a missing chart or a page of notes.
Finally, ensure that you’re in a quiet place without excessive amount of background noise, or any background noise for that matter.
Speak Clearly
Now that you’ve got everything that you need and you’ve found a nice, quiet area, it’s time to begin dictating.
It’s absolutely critical that you speak as clearly as possible. While also maintaining a nice, steady rhythm. Don’t blaze through certain sections and then go extra slow through others. Transcribers don’t need any added difficulty when it comes to speed and accuracy.
With that in mind, it’s also critical that you determine how far from your mouth you should hold your device. Most models will have a recommended optimal distance in their owner’s manuals, but you may need to experiment a little.
Medical practices face some unique dictation challenges due to one simple fact. Medical terms tend be very long on sometimes hard to understand. If you find that you must use these terms often, be sure to state them as clearly as possible. Also consider spelling them out.
Finally, if you do make a mistake, don’t just say note it in the recording. Go back and edit it out to avoid any unnecessary confusion.
Voice Recognition Software
The simple fact of the matter is this: If you’re still using a transcription service, it’s time for you to make an upgrade.
At the end of the day, the single most effective change you can make to your dictation/transcription process is to invest in voice recognition software.
Dragon Medical provides all of the benefits of a transcription service and then some. boasting a high accuracy rating and an extensive medical dictionary that covers dozens of specialties.
It can save your practice up to 30 minutes a day, leaving physicians to spend more time with their patients and less time doing tedious work.