In this issue:

Announcements - We've Moved!
Announcements - Upcoming Shows
Talk Clinical Tour
March Medical Specials
Success Story - Dr. Harlan Gibbs
Buzzwords
Tech Tools & Tips
Contact Us

Announcements

Talk Clinical Tour
Making your clinical documentation soar - Oceanside!

On March 4, Zephyr-TEC hosted the "Talk Clinical Tour" an information-packed seminar about speech recognition in the clinical setting. The seminar was held at the historic El Adobe de Capistrano restaurant in beautiful San Juan Capistrano.

The seminar was widely attended with over 50 physicians, administrators and IT professionals in attendance. Speaking were Renee Griffith - CEO and Founder of Zephyr-TEC, Mark Erwich - Senior Director of Marketing, Nuance Healthcare Solutions and Dr. Harlan Gibbs - Director of Emergency Medicine, Glendale Adventist Hospital.

Over dinner, the audience learned how solutions from Nuance Healthcare are helping physicians optimize productivity, and reduce costs. Topics included:

• Spending more time with patients
• Increasing your practice revenue
• Dramatically reducing your operating costs
• Turbo-charging your physicians' job satisfaction
• Coding at a higher level for higher reimbursements
• Creating more accurate, higher quality notes, in your own words!
  

It was an interactive, Margarita fueled event which included a demonstration by an actual physician! Zephyr-TEC hopes to host more of these events in different locations the future

March Medical Specials
Spring, when a young doctor's thoughts turn to being more productive

We've got a couple of nice Dragon Medical specials running right now to get you up and going with Dragon Medical. But these offers expire March 29, so get your order in soon! Do note that, unfortunately, you cannot combine these offers.

Buy Dragon Medical, get the Mic for free!
Purchase one license of Dragon Medical OLP, and get a free handheld PowerMic II! This package includes the wonderful Dragon Medical 10.1 along with one year of software maintenance and the PowerMic II, which is definitely a microphone we like. It's very easy to use and customize, all within Dragon. If you're looking to get started with Dragon, but are used to dictating into a recorder - this feels very similar, and could be what you want to make the transition easier. This package is on sale for $1795 through March 29, 2010. <Click here to order>

Buy 5 Dragon Medical licenses, get a sixth for free!
Purchase five (5) licenses of Dragon Medical OLP, and get a free handheld PowerMic II! This package includes licenses for five dictators for the wonderful Dragon Medical 10.1 along with one year of software maintenance -- and then throws in a sixth license as well! If you're looking to get started across the practice, this is what you need to get up and running. Extend those productivity benefits to nurses or PAs! This package is on sale for $9727.94 through March 29, 2010. <Click here to order>

But remember, these specials do expire March 29, 2010. Click the above links, or give us a call at:

1-877-493-7497

Success Story
Dr. Harlan Gibbs - Director of Emergency Medicine

Earlier this month, Zephyr-TEC hosted the "Talk Clinical Tour", an informative seminar profiling Dragon NaturallySpeaking in a clinical setting. The keynote speaker at the seminar was Dr. Harlan Gibbs.

Dr. Gibbs is a Harvard-trained Internist and is board certified in both Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine, and a Fellow in the American College of Emergency Physicians. Dr. Gibbs completed his undergraduate studies at Tufts University in Boston, graduating Magna Cum Laude. He received his medical degree from Tufts, followed by a residency through Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Gibbs currently serves as the Director of Emergency Medicine at Glendale Adventist Medical Center.

A few years ago, Glendale Adventist mandated deployment of an EHR. Prior to the EHR, doctors were using forms with checkboxes and handwritten notes to chronicle patient encounters. In a progressive rollout, the EHR was to be deployed first and speech recognition integration was to follow.

With the implementation of the EHR, Dr. Gibbs felt his productivity was down 50%. Even after several months and overcoming the initial learning curve he felt his productivity was still off by at least 30%. Nearly everyone complained about the extensive mousing, drilling through menus and drop lists and keyboarding that was required with the complex system (death by clicking). He was staying many hours after his shifts to complete notes and the quality of those notes was decreased. He said he felt he was less a doctor and more a medical records clerk.

At this point, Zephyr-TEC was brought in to begin deployment of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical. Dr. Gibbs was one of five doctors chosen initially to work with Dragon. A custom training program, vocabularies and macros were developed to help the doctors increase the speed of their data entry into the EHR.

As Dr. Gibbs related to the audience, after a few weeks of using Dragon, correcting the mistakes it made and adding to its vocabulary, he noted the following:

• His level of productivity nears pre-EHR levels and continues to improve (although may never be as fast as checking checkboxes on a paper form)
• The quality of his notes is superior - promising increased reimbursements
• Cost savings over transcription are significant
• The turnaround time for documentation is immediate
• He can go home on time

Dr. Gibbs also explained that in his multicultural ER there is often a language barrier during the initial patient encounter. He said he has heard numerous times because he can dictate the patient encounter notes in his own words, other physicians are better able to understand what is truly wrong with the patient and recommend the correct course of treatment.

Dr. Gibbs, a self-professed "techno dummy" gave the audience a demonstration of Dragon Medical Version 10 using the PowerMic II. After dictating several paragraphs of free text (with 100% recognition) he then demonstrated several of his vocabulary entries; including some of the longer and more difficult names of his staff and boilerplate text macros.

Dr. Gibbs concluded his talk by stating he was seriously considering leaving the Hospital after the deployment of the EHR. Dragon NaturallySpeaking software and the training he received have allowed him to continue working in a productive, comfortable manner. He said "I would not use the EHR without speech recognition. Dragon made me love practicing medicine again."

Buzzwords
Not sure what it means? Well stay tuned ...

With all the constant change in the field of dictation technology, we thought it would be useful to explain a few buzzwords from speech recognition and digital dictation and then give actual definitions. Here's a few more:

ROI: Return on Investment (ROI) is a typical calculation done to determine how long before the savings introduced by a change will equal the initial spending on the change. Implementing Dragon Medical for a fifteen-doctor practice might result in a ROI of about 4 months, once they are all up and running.

NLP: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of computer study that attempts to extract information from written text. For example, filling in the fields of an EHR database directly from the dictation of a physician.

Still confused? Send us an e-mail at info@zephyr-tec.com and we'll clarify for you!

Tech Tools & Tips
Improved Formatting in Dragon Medical Version 10

A new interface for medical formatting options allows you to set how Dragon Medical displays dictation of information like times, dates, units of measure, and acronyms for medical conditions and procedures.

To access the Formatting dialog box, on your Dragon bar choose: Tools > Formatting.

In the example above, how to format expressions with feet and inches has been selected.

Choices in the drop-down list and their resulting output:

So, during your next lunch hour (or lunch hr) poke around in Formatting to select the ways you would like Dragon to write your dictation 100% (or 100 percent) of the time.