Why?

Like many other, I suppose, my group had hoped to improve our office by using Dragon Medical. We're a 3 physician group, with an office staff of about 15. We have two main offices, and two satellite offices-- the main offices have a physician present at all times, whereas the satellite offices are staffed only once a week, or sometimes less.

Our current setup is that we dictate into the phone, and the dictations are transcribed overseas and then emailed back to us. The number of errors in the text is very high, and we have our office staff read over the transcriptions, then print them out for our final review. Our review staff does not have medical training, or training in medical transcription. Thus, almost all transcriptions have some form of error. The physicians correct the errors by hand and then return the transcriptions to the staff, who make the changes before a final copy is signed off.

We'd like to get two of the physicians running on Dragon. Our monthly transcription costs are around $750 per physician.

With great trepidation we set forth to implement Dragon in our office. Our goal is to reduce transcription costs, at least enough to allow us to recover the cost of the software, and our hope is that gaining familiarity with dragon may help us in the future, as we hope to implement an EMR within 2-3 years.