Mercy University Hospital

Background

The Mercy University Hospital is a public voluntary hospital, employing 1,200 staff and providing a comprehensive range of services including 24/7 acute surgery, acute medicine and critical care to over 37,000 patients a year.

MUH is a hospital with a long-standing tradition of excellence and service and has a reputation for providing high-quality care. When they discovered that their dictation and documentation processes were not keeping up with their workload demand, they decided it was time to make a change that would better support their needs as well as the needs of their patients.

Solution

T-Pro's platform is a customised, integrated digital dictation and clinical correspondence solution designed to provide doctors, medical secretaries and managers with an intuitive, easy to use interface enabling them to easily create, track, transcribe and manage workloads centrally; as well as allowing them to leverage additional options such as speech recognition, outsourced transcription services or smartphone-based dictation.

"After reviewing several solutions, we found T-Pro to be a far superior system. Their transcription team has the capacity to type over 7,000 letters a month and ensure turnaround is consistently rapid and accurate. Our clinicians found it easy to use and the management capabilities are robust. T-Pro’s national integration with iPMS patient administration system was also a big plus."

Mary Twohig
Healthcare Records Manager, Mercy University Hospital

• Using a smartphone, clinicians dictate directly from a pre-generated clinic list, meaning each dictation is automatically and correctly tagged per patient.
• The sound file is then routed securely to T-Pro’s experienced medical transcriptionists.
• The resulting letter is returned to the relevant medical secretary who, on opening the file, is presented with the transcribed text within an editor.
• This editor has a feature set designed to maximise the efficiency of proofreading and editing; words are highlighted as the playback is controlled with the foot pedal and the auto-text function speeds up any required changes
• The automated demographic retrieval populates relevant address and GP details, ensuring document accuracy, and accelerating the editing/transcription process.
• On completion of the proof-reading stage, the work is submitted back to the clinician who can rapidly check and electronically sign/approve documents via web or mobile app.
• The final step then includes some intelligent routing and interfacing with the hospital's electronic document management system.

Benefits

The hospital was able to improve turnaround and reduce costs that would have otherwise been required to hire medical secretaries or agency staff to handle their documentation demands.

"With our previous dictation and transcription service, it took a couple of days before completed letters were made available. With T-Pro, we have been able to produce letters much faster, and now receive transcribed patient reports within 24 hours, which has enabled our clinicians to treat and respond to patients quicker”

said Twohig.

With the introduction of T-Pro’s mobile dictation app, clinicians quickly dropped their dictation devices in favour of going mobile. T-Pro enabled them to be more productive on the go, and dictate at the point of care. T-Pro also built and created a bespoke mobile dictation app called “Mercy Dictate” to allow the hospital to maintain a single brand entity, which incorporates their branding and allows for a richer user experience.

The implementation of T-Pro’s digital dictation and transcription service at the Mercy University Hospital was more than just your standard run-of-the-mill software implementation. Rather, this was a product of several teams coming together to work towards a common goal, which was to provide MUH with an efficient dictation and transcription system that has high usability and enables their providers to deliver better patient care. Moreover, the system was rolled out to 200 users in less than two weeks.